Dusk turned the jungle to an eerie, formless gray. A breeze whispered through the treetops. He had come to know the jungle as a living thing, a breathing thing that gave up no dead.
Bolan let his thoughts slip away, and listened below the faint rustling of leaves.
He stopped beside a thicket. A scraping sound slipped through the leaves around him. He eased the AR to full auto and searched for movement. The jungle surrounded him, held him, breaking his vision with a confusion of vegetation that sighed almost imperceptibly in the pale darkness. Where the hell was Buddy?
Bolan eased himself back a step. The scraping sound came from behind.
Bolan turned in painfully slow motion, the AR's snout moving with him.
The jungle was still.
It was Buddy. He was squatting beside a pool of black water that reflected the deepening, broken sky.
Connecticut was gone from Buddy.
Mack Bolan looked back a million years at the small man squatting in the swamp, shaving his head with a knife.
"Don't do it, Buddy."
"I'm done for, Mack."
"No, you're not." Bolan was crouched beside him.
They talked four inches apart. Buddy scraped his head with his killing knife, shaving the hairs from the scalp, but leaving a full swath from brow to nape. The Mohawk.
Bolan wanted to stay his hand, stop the shaving, as if that would alter Buddy's fate — but Bolan did not want his throat slit.
Buddy shaved and talked in a shaky voice. An orange spider emerged from behind his ear and crawled carefully down his neck.
"I smelled Leslie today. No, really. All of a sudden it just hit me. It was like she was beside me. Can you believe I gave her up to do a second tour? Man, I smelled her hair, her skin." Buddy was lost in himself, talking unevenly as he shaved. "You want to hear something even crazier? I had this memory, finally, of my mother, like I've never been able to remember her. She died when I was three. But today I remembered her giving me a bath."
"Buddy? What was in the letter you got this morning?" asked Bolan, though he already knew.
Buddy swallowed but continued shaving, as if by rote. The spider, which had crawled so carefully down his neck, rode Buddy's Adam's apple as he swallowed, but then danced in alarm as the water came trickling down from Buddy's head.
"Oh, you know. Leslie, ah..." he swallowed again "...Leslie got herself a Jody. I knew it would happen."
"Buddy, you've got to remember..."
"Only regret I have is that I won't be coming back to cut his frigging balls off," Buddy said to no one as he rinsed the short hairs from his blade. It was Buddy's trademark — the knife that was super-sharp but dark. It reflected no light. Bolan could hardly see Buddy now. Their whispers hissed in the half light.
"You're doing the Mohawk because of Jody? That's not like you."
"It's not Jody, man. It's this fucking mission. I got this feeling. First we go to penetrate the village that Intelligence says is a VC camp, and it ain't. Just a bunch of goddamn villagers. Did you see those little kids with the water buffalo? If you hadn't called off the air strike they'd be dead meat. And then we hump it to the next village and there's no VC there, either. Then I got that smell and my mother, and I see myself in the water, and I get hit with this feeling. Buddy, you're a dead man. Time for the Mohawk. Buddy's going to die in the Mekong."
Bolan watched as Buddy rose on his haunches. He was sweating like a pig, staring at the jungle. Beads of sweat on his forehead and brow reflected the last touches of light. His left hand hung down to the muck, clutching the blade. Bolan saw Buddy's nostrils quivering. A Mohawk meant you weren't coming back. He wanted Buddy before he slipped away any farther.
"That's a beautiful Mohawk, Buddy."
"You think so?"
"Can I make a suggestion?"
"Sure."
"Spread some mud on your scalp. It's shining white."
Buddy reached into the muck and looked at it as though reading the entrails of his own corpse.
Slowly he raised his hands to his scalp and worked the swamp muck on either side of the stripe of chestnut hair.
When finished he looked up at Mack Bolan as if his mind were made up all the more. Keeping his hollow eyes fixed on Bolan, he lifted the cord that hung around his neck and gathered it in his hand.
"Here. I want you to have this." He reached over and put the tangle in Bolan's palm. A human ear hung from the cord, limp and leathery. "My first kill. It's yours."
"I don't want this," said Bolan. "Never have."
"Take it."
"No."
Bolan saw the look on Buddy's face and put the ear in his pocket. They moved off, with Buddy walking point.
The darkness grew wet with rain.
They crawled into position just as the moon was sinking behind the scrub.
Before them lay the enemy camp, a hillock among the mangroves that was honeycombed with tunnels and caves. It looked to be a full fifty yards across the top.
This jungle would hide an army forever. The delta was fingered with ridges that rose from the primeval swamp, covered in scrub oak and nettles in an endless, unbroken cover of vegetation. The VC gathered and struck their targets when and where they chose, always melting away into the delta.
There was no way of destroying them without destroying the delta itself.
The young Sergeant Bolan had picked up a Washington newspaper with the Pentagon's account of areas controlled by American and RV forces. He found it a cruel joke. The allies never held any position more than temporarily, and then only as long as their firepower blasted anything that moved. The VC owned the night, anywhere and anytime they wanted to collect.
Buddy and Bolan watched the occasional movements of VC in the camp, trying to make out where the tunnels began and ended.
There were too many entrances to count.
"I think we hit the jackpot," Buddy said.
"I stopped counting at ten."
"This is a hard-core regiment. These guys aren't farming by day."
"Probably sitting on enough ammo and supplies for the whole quadrant," muttered Bolan. "We can't do this alone. We'll do a sapper job on the place, then call in the choppers once the action starts."
"You do the perimeter, Mack. I'm going in to see if I can blow the ammo. Meet by that trail in an hour and a half."
Bolan was about to say, "No, I'll go in," but Buddy had already slipped into the swamp that lay at the foot of the ridge.
Bolan gave him five minutes and then snaked in himself. He felt the cool touch of the water as it slipped through his fatigues and surrounded his body. With only his eyes above the waterline, Bolan crawled toward the camp. The moon had set.
Bolan eased every thought from his mind. He was empty. He let everything of himself slip away.
He reduced himself to a presence. The water passed through him. He became pure killer.
Where the ridge rose from the swamp, Bolan slowed to almost imperceptible movement. In his mind he was Buddy's blade — a death that reflected no light.
He rose from the water so slowly he could feel the evaporation from his neck. Every nerve was vacant yet highly aware.
Ten feet away two guards sat in a shallow hole, looking at him.
Bolan's crawl toward them was agonizingly slow. They looked directly at him but could not see his form in the dark swamp. Bolan saw the outline of rifles in their laps.
Bolan lowered each hand carefully as he crawled, testing the surface before he let his weight press on it. He covered four feet in ten minutes.
An eternity passed. One of the guards moved his head, sending an alarm along the swamp crawler's spine. Bolan's hand came down slowly on something plastic. A claymore.
Bolan could smell the guards. He was five feet from their hole. He began to turn the claymore around, five degrees at a time, so that it faced the guards.
One guard turned to the other and spoke in a whisper. The second guard sat up listening, the claymore wires in his hands.
Bolan stopped breathing when he saw the wires.
His lungs began to burn. His heart pounded audibly in his ears.
Three feet away the guard's knees shifted in the blackness.
Nothing more was said. The two guards listened intently.
Bolan finished rotating the claymore and moved off into the blackness.
Then he turned two more.
Time was running out. Bolan finished the perimeter after an agonizing hour and then crawled into the camp to meet Buddy.
Bolan felt Buddy's breath before he heard him. The voice came in his ear, barely perceptible.
"I found the commander. He's copying something down on his map as the radioman gets it. They're giving out the locations of the VC regiments."
"Did you hear any of it?"
"Hear it? I'm going for the map, Mack."
"You've got a pair of brass balls, my friend."
"I always knew I'd die in this shit hole." Buddy slid off before Bolan could say anything more. Bolan's guts went cold.
Bolan crouched by the trail, knife in hand. He felt a centipede scamper up his leg, but remained motionless. It was not worth risking exposure to kill it. He could feel it work its way into his crotch.
A cry went up within the tunnels the instant that Buddy returned silently to Bolan's position. Someone had found the dead commander and radioman.
Adrenaline coursed through the two Americans as they ran away from the trail, into the brush. A claymore blew, sending a flash and a bizarre shadow through the foliage. Then another, and a scream, and then the AR's opened up. The VC were shooting at one another and the Americans were escaping through the perimeter. The firefight reared its head around them, cutting the jungle to tatters. Bolan jumped, doubled over, across a thicket, then heard Buddy grunt. He turned back, saw something that looked like Buddy on the ground, and then the VC rained heavy machine-gun fire across the distance that separated them.
Bolan crawled under the fire and grabbed Buddy's elbow, dragging him through a pool of viscous muck, part of which was Buddy's own vomit. The enemy were firing from two directions now; a crisscross of angry slugs whined hotly past in bright flashes.
Bolan picked up Buddy and ran as fast as his legs could pump. There was too much confusion to hear anything. He crashed through the brush with Buddy's guts leaking down his back.
"The dirty bastards," Buddy was chanting. "This dirty fucking war!" Finally he sank to his knees by the radio.
Bolan had circled to find the radio, and was breathless. He keyed the set quickly. He could hear the VC following the trail of Buddy's blood. They would be on top of him soon. With one hand over Buddy's mouth, Bolan gave the coordinates for an artillery hit, followed by another set for the Med-evac. Then he lifted the radio and Buddy and staggered away.
On the next ridge Bolan sat with the radio calling the coordinates again.
From far off he heard the booming of the big guns, then the blasts that shook his stomach as the big shells staggered up the ridge.
"East fifty... north thirty..." Bolan was waiting for the big one. The shell that would blow that ammo. "North another thirty," he said, and then it went. The sky cracked open. Bolan and Buddy lay side by side as the ground bucked beneath the roiling fireball. In the reflection of Buddy's glazed eyes Bolan saw the flames blossom.
"Buddy didn't make it, Mack," said Crawford. The lieutenant colonel was Bolan's commanding officer, but every man in Penetration Team Able was the CO's equal as far as Crawford was concerned. "He caught too many slugs. Too damn many."
The sun had risen, turning the shack into a steam bath. A portable fan blew fetid air at them. Bolan's eyes burned like coals.
"Where is he?"
"They shipped him out. He's going back to the States in a bag. Still has a father alive, I think."
Bolan said nothing. Crawford offered him a cigarette and then lit it for him.
"I'm not going on the next mission."
"Mack, we've all lost friends."
"I don't mean that. Buddy went in after a map he saw the commander drawing on. I bet he's still got it."
"No way. I emptied his pockets myself. Nothing. Except the letter from home."
"Then he swallowed it."
"Mack, come on now..."
"No way. Buddy knew he was going home in a bag... A field map is made of canvas and paper. The part of it that Buddy swallowed could still be undissolved in his stomach right now."
Crawford was about to reply, but said nothing. It was true about Buddy knowing he was going to die, of course. Everyone had seen the Mohawk. He tapped a pencil nervously on the desk.
"Let me call down to Saigon. I have a friend who works..."
Bolan cut him off. "I'm doing this personally. No more depending on someone else who doesn't care."
Crawford sighed wearily. "All right. This is going to take a lot of Vaseline. A lot." Crawford picked up the telephone and said to Mack, "Get a fresh uniform." Then, "Get me Colonel Winters."
The chopper landed with a lurch. That was what Nam felt like to Bolan, just as the lurch of a pickup was what New England felt like. He stepped out and looked across the tarmac at the depot, an immense corrugated metal structure shining in the bright sun like an airplane hangar.
Beyond it a transport lifted off, the heat of its exhaust turning the surrounding jungle into a shimmering blob of green. The depot was temporary; the jungle would win it back. Bolan never looked at the jungle without thinking about its inevitable victory.
The office jutted out from the side of the depot like an unwanted appendage. Everyone wore clean crisp uniforms. The place was calm, but eerie in its calmness; Bolan wanted out, though he did not give himself that choice.
He walked in and explained his visit to a fresh-looking kid from Alabama.
Then he waited for someone with authority. On the radio an English voice was singing about sympathy and the Devil.
Bolan resisted the urge to crush the radio under his boot. This was the rear.
This was how it was back here. He wanted out more than ever.
Ten minutes later a man came to the office in a white coat. He looked like a New York cabdriver, but spoke in educated tones.
"Dr. Morgan," he said, reaching out a hand. "What's the problem?"
Bolan explained. He needed to locate a corpse. There might be some vital intel within the body itself. As he talked they entered the depot. Bolan was hit by the coldness of the air. Then he understood — air-conditioning.
He hadn't felt it in... how long? A past life.
"What's the name and serial number?"
Bolan withdrew the slip of paper from his pocket and read the serial number. They were standing in a giant warehouse divided by rack upon rack of dead GI's in plastic bags. The racks went down the length of the room, parallel, chilling. A thousand dead eyes staring through milky plastic at the ceiling. The predominant smell was of disinfectant.
"You see, a piece of canvas and paper like that would ninety-nine times in a hundred be lost. We have to remove the viscera from the body and then stuff the cavity with cotton soaked in formaldehyde. There's no way we could ship them otherwise. And all that junk goes down into the bins for disposal."
Morgan called to another whitecoat talking to a private in uniform. They came over and the grunt was sent to locate Buddy.
The other doctor doubted they would have seen such a piece of paper.
They told Bolan about their careers as coroners back home. Bolan did not respond.
The grunt called them over and stood waiting with cap in hand, pointing to a long bag on a wheeled stretcher. Morgan unzipped the top of the bag.
Bolan looked down at Buddy's face.
"This one's done. You do this one, Mike?"
"I can't remember. Sergeant, this one's already done. I guess you're a little late."
Bolan looked down at the bag.
Buddy's Mohawk was sticking up beyond the folds of the plastic.
"Cut him open again. I have to be sure."
"Are you crazy? We already took his guts out."
"Cut him open again."
"Sergeant, you don't seem to understand..."
"It's you who doesn't understand, doctor. Get your goddamn knife out, or I'll do it myself."
Morgan turned to the grunt. "Get the guards. This crazy asshole needs cooling off."
The grunt keyed the walkie-talkie and called for guards. Bolan fumed.
"Morgan, your ass is on the line for this."
A door flew open at the far end of the room.
Two MP's trotted in, bats at the ready.
"Sergeant," the doctor said to Bolan, "you'd better watch what you say, or you'll go home in a plastic uniform, too."
Bolan waited for the transport to lift off into the night. Then he vaulted the fence. The depot was not exactly a high security area. He crossed the tarmac without seeing anyone.
The doors at the loading bay were still open.
Bolan walked in as if he belonged there. He saw only grunts. This was probably a new shift.
Inside the storage area he felt again the coolness. The song about the Devil would not leave his head. Without hesitation, Bolan climbed into a forklift and motored down the aisles to the spot where Buddy lay. He checked the serial number of the bag's ID tag and lifted the body onto the pallet of the forklift. Then he motored to the side of the room.
Bolan worked hidden by the forklift. He unzipped the bag, bracing himself against the stench of putrefaction. Buddy stared up at him from a drained face. His skin was a dull grayish green, cold and sagging. Dried mud clung to his scalp. Bolan wondered about the person welcoming Buddy home.
They would never understand what was about to happen.
Bolan forced open the jaws and looked inside. It was an ugly purple-black hole that stank. Nothing.
He took the knife from his pocket and held it to Buddy's neck where the crude stitches began. Buddy's sightless eyes stared at him, his Mohawk stark on his scalp. Bolan closed Buddy's eyes.
He sank the knife into the dead throat and pulled. Buddy's eyes popped open.
Quickly Bolan drew the knife downward to the belly and watched the flesh part along the broken stitches. He separated the flesh and stared in shock.
Bags of white powder sat gleaming among the gray-pink cavity of Buddy's corpse.
Bolan broke one open and tasted it. Heroin.
The vulgarity of it made Bolan sick. In a daze he closed the bag, put it back on the shelf and left.
For once in his life Bolan was too sickened to think.
Bolan sat in a Saigon bar, trying to get Buddy's face to go away, but wherever he looked he saw it. The bar radio called mockingly from home. The songs would never sound the same for him. He hated them, now and forever.
Rage was twisting his guts into a knot.
Three GI's sat on beat-up chairs at a table, crushing beer cans. The ceiling fan crisscrossed them with shadows as they talked at one another of their sexual exploits.
Bolan drowned out their boasting. He had to consider his options: the local police, who were in the pay of the VC or the smugglers or both; the American Military Police, who could just about tie their shoes and swing a bat and not much else; the Division command; or the CIA. Bolan chose the most powerful people in the country: the CIA.
He went to the telephone just as two Vietnamese girls entered the room.
Bolan paused momentarily. They were identical twins, both petite and slender and lovely. He heard a whistle from the GI's and watched the girls ignore the whistle. Bolan telephoned.
He waited through the clicks and buzzes, and eventually got through to someone named Barker, who proceeded to question Bolan in a bored but probing way. Bolan was vague; Barker was feeling him out to see if he was a crazy.
Bolan went as far as he would go, then demanded an interview. Barker took down the location and said he would send someone over.
Bolan hung up and turned around, The GI's stood over the girls who stood mutely at the bar. The girls wanted to leave.
The tallest of the GI's leaned down and beery centered his red-rimmed eyes on one of the twins.
"You not like me, baby-san? You understand I want a little tail tonight?" The GI drained his beer and said to the other, "I think I'm seein' double, Frank. Two fuckin' identical pieces of tail. Man oh man."
"Never liked slant-eyed pussy myself," said Frank, burping.
"Got no complaints about it myself," said the tall one. "So long as I'm sure it ain't dead." The girls tried to leave, but he grabbed them by their wrists. "Oh, hey, the party's just starting."
Bolan felt his hands twitch. He'd seen enough. "Let them go," he said, wearily.
The GI's turned to stare at the big bastard in the sergeant's uniform. Did he want these two women for himself? Conversation stopped; only the radio continued its mocking, something about someone was going to the chapel.
"Come on, Sarge," said one of the GI's, pulling out cash from his pocket. "They're only slopes."
Rage ran through Bolan like electricity. His hands snaked apart, one clutching the GI's uniform at the neck, the other drawing back and then lashing him cruelly in the face. The GI dropped his money, his face running with blood, and sank to his knees. His friend held him, tottering and bleeding, and looked up hotly at the big bastard standing over them. "What are you, a Commie or something?"
The bartender had called the MP's. Now he stood wiping nervously at the bar, half watching. The two GI's were busy trying to lift their friend from the dirty floor before the arrival of the pricks with the hats and bats.
A Jeep lurched to a stop outside the bar.
Bolan turned; not the MP's, but a man in sunglasses with a whore. This would be the CIA contact, he guessed.
They were the only people around here who wore sunglasses at night.
"You Bolan?" the man called out as he sat lazily in the Jeep. Neon flashed on him in red and blue. "I'm Naiman."
"Who the hell is she?" asked Bolan, climbing into the back of the Jeep.
"Don't worry, I'm just dropping her off."
Bolan looked at Naiman's whore. False eyelashes sat incongruously on her eyelids. She sucked a long cigarette. She probably spoke French. Yeah, she'd lain under a regiment of sweating officers and bureaucrats, first from France, then from America.
The whore ran her fingers down Naiman's neck as he drove through the streets. He shrugged to shake her off. She was whispering to him, increasing the force of her nails, digging them into his flesh. She wanted him to pick her up the next night. Naiman shook his head, motioning with his eyes to indicate the passenger in the back seat. She left off, insulted, and then said, "You not really a strong man like I said, Jim. You a mama's boy."
"Sure, sure," said Naiman, pulling the Jeep to a stop in front of a hovel. She got out, holding her snakeskin purse. Bolan could see through the fabric of her shirt that she wore a snakeskin bra to match. "Talk to you soon, Barbra-Ann."
Bolan climbed into the front seat. "Drive," he said.
They wheeled through the cool darkness. The time before dawn was the only time offering respite from the dreadful heat and humidity. In the stillness drifted the booming of far-off artillery.
Saigon slipped past them, a dirty, hunched, downtrodden city.
Gradually the density of dwellings thinned, and Bolan smelled the dew and the river.
Naiman pulled the Jeep into a gravel field between the railroad tracks and the river.
"Who was the guy I spoke to first?" asked Mack.
"I don't know. I got a call from the secretary. Why?"
"I don't like it. The fewer people who know about this thing the better."
"This thing being."
Bolan told him about the trouble with the coroner, Morgan, and then of cutting open Buddy and finding the bags of raw heroin. A transport plane roared overhead as they talked, wing lights streaking in the darkness.
Another load of dead would be vibrating in its belly.
Naiman sighed, considering. He saw ramifications.
"You're right, Sergeant," he said, turning to look at Bolan. "The CIA has a duty to stop this. I don't know if I, personally, will handle the case..." A crack split the air. Naiman's head blew apart, his forehead exploding in a wet spray that lashed Bolan's face.
Bolan rolled to the ground, gripping his Colt M16.
Slugs ripped into the Jeep with a scream of metal.
Under the Jeep, Bolan watched the tires of the cars as they swung across the gravel toward him, spraying dirt and stones. Someone in the car was raking the Jeep with slugs, but the car's headlights were still not turned on.
Bolan rolled to the right, coming up with his submachine gun pointing to the car. From his right flank Bolan saw another car, and then they both jerked on their fights.
Bolan was caught like an animal in the blinding glare. He rolled again, dodging the killer slugs, and then with a steady stance blew the lights from the car ahead.
Slugs from the second car chewed the dirt, zipping up toward him. He aimed and took out the driver of the second car. The lights went crazy as the driver jerked the pedal to the floor and smashed into a post.
Engines roared like hellions in the lonely yard.
The first car was dark but still spitting slugs.
Bolan was in darkness now. He ran at the second car, its engine screaming futilely. Bolan veered when the door opened, and a gunman climbed out.
In the darkness Bolan just made out the chain-link fence before he hit it. He vaulted in time, grunting, clawing for the top.
Halfway over, fingers clawing through the wires, Bolan felt the fence shaking under the impact of the slugs. The vibrations stung his hands as the gunmen pasted the fence with fire.
Bolan dropped over and fell behind a stack of steel drums. Slugs cut through the metal.
Bolan waited for his pursuers to get closer.
With deep slow breaths he cut the pounding of his blood to a roar, and took aim. He saw that the gunmen wore suits. He selected a face and blew it apart. The second gunman dropped to the ground, bringing up an AR.
But Bolan had gone.
Splashes in the river were all that could be heard. The sounds retreated downriver.
Bolan heard voices in the brightness. He woke and jumped up simultaneously, grabbing for his gun even before he knew where he was. The Colt was in his grasp as he blinked, trying to see who to kill. It was only children playing on the riverbank. God, one day a Nam vet was going to jump out of his sleep and kill his own kid before he realized he was no longer in Nam.
The sun was well above the horizon, the day already hot and oppressive.
Bolan was coated in sweat as he crouched under a railway bridge. Twenty yards down the riverbank, a cluster of Vietnamese children were throwing rocks into the river. Bolan wiped sweat from his face and thought of the countless stones he had skipped into rivers as a child.
Some things were universal for children, even in war.
Pleasure came unexpectedly in this place.
The children were excitedly picking up stones from the bank, competing for some target that floated just at the surface of the water. Bolan watched as it drifted closer. The stones splashed into the water around it. The children were following it down with the current toward Bolan.
When it was fifteen yards away, Bolan saw what it was. The corpse floated feet first, puffy and discolored, stripped naked.
The face was gone, blown away by a slug, but Bolan could tell the body was a Westerner's and not a Vietnamese's. A rock from one of the kids hit the chest with a hollow thump and bounced into the water. The child laughed; another threw up his arms in triumph. The rest went back upriver, throwing at a second body.
Bolan grabbed the kid by the arm. The kid practically jumped from his skin at the big guy's touch. He looked up in fear. Bolan addressed him in Vietnamese, asked him if he wanted to make some money for his family.
The kid agreed cautiously. Bolan wrote out a Vietnamese name and an address in Saigon and handed the paper to him, along with some money. The young boy handed back the paper. He was illiterate. Bolan told him the name and address and had him repeat it to him. If he brought the man back with him there would be more money, but he must hurry and he must tell no one.
The child raced off. His friends were excited more corpses were coming down. Bolan heard another thump.
The first corpse came closer to shore as it drifted under the bridge.
Bolan waded in. The corpse passed from sunlight to shadow and its color emerged better: greenish-gray skin, purple on the underside where the blood had settled. Red hair — that would be important. Bolan pulled it into an eddy under the bridge. The face was unrecognizable.
The second corpse drifted headfirst. Bolan had to chase a buzzard off the face before it would give up its meal. Another head shot. Chestnut hair.
The third corpse was Vietnamese — shot in the chest, but the face had been hit and was swollen and distorted.
Naiman didn't come down the river. Bolan waited as the day grew hotter.
The corpses swirled in the slow eddy, around and around like a kindergarten game. The sun was advancing across the eddy, and they would be well on their way to rotting in a few more hours. Bolan watched them go around and around, bobbing in the heat.
An hour later the boy returned with a Vietnamese man dressed in a white suit. Bolan gave the boy his money and sent him off.
"Vu Quoc Thanh. Thanks for coming."
"What do you want from me, Sergeant Bolan? I cannot help you in your position."
"What position is that?"
"You murdered Jim Naiman last night. They know you work for the VC. Every police force and intelligence force is looking for you."
"Do you really believe that I killed him, Thanh, after the work we have done together?"
"In this war I can believe anything."
Bolan motioned to the corpses turning in the eddy.
"Do you know any of them?"
The Vietnamese walked over and watched them go around.
"The Vietnamese I don't know. I think he is a tribesman. Meo, or Laotian."
"And the others?"
"We have seen them before. They are the foreigners." Thanh looked back at Bolan, his sunglasses reflecting the river and the sampans. It was a long look. Someone was going to have to kill Thanh very soon.
Bolan was pushing the bodies out into the current, when he heard Thanh's voice come from the bridge above.
"You want a reason, Sergeant? History repeats itself. The Council of Kings."
Bolan looked at tiny room through the slatted vent of the locker. The coroners worked at an enamel table in the center of the white-tiled room. He breathed slowly, calmly, so that he remained perfectly still and could not be heard. The place was cool, even in his hiding place. Indeed, it was chilling.
They unzipped the bag and turned their heads away as the odor escaped.
Bolan saw a young man's face. The kid was maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, the tendons tightened into a grimace. They pulled the bag off him and began stripping away his tattered fatigues.
"Jesus Christ," said one of the coroners. "Here I was looking for a bullet wound and he doesn't have any."
"Bled to death," said Morgan.
They stripped him naked and dead.
"I've seen this before," Morgan told the other coroner. "Every time they do one of these pacification programs we get the weirdest sights. This guy was reckoning on slipping it to a slope, okay? But she's the enemy. She gets a tube, or a toilet roll or whatever, and lines it with razor blades. Bob from Nebraska here gives her one in the hut and bang. The way blood pumps into erectile tissue, I'd say he was dead in fifteen seconds."
The other man was slitting the body open down the belly and letting the guts drop through the well in the table into a sealed bin below. Bolan heard the slick plop as the intestinal matter hit bottom.
"What are they going to tell this kid's mother?"
"Maybe they'll give him the Purple Heart."
They worked, cleaning the cavity and stuffing it with the cotton and formaldehyde. The man across from Morgan broke the silence.
"Shouldn't we lay low for a while?" he said softly.
"No problem," Morgan replied. "They're going to put that crazy young sergeant in the slammer for good."
The odor from the corpse drifted over to Bolan.
It invaded the locker, filling his nostrils with the stench of putrefaction.
The coroner brought over a cardboard box and began placing bags of white powder among the cotton in the GI's gut space. Dr. Morgan walked over to his desk and unlocked a drawer. He took out some papers and a pencil.
"What's the serial number on this one?"
The other man read the number and Morgan copied it down.
"What does Putnam say about all this?" asked Morgan's partner.
"Don't mention his name again. Especially to any of the others. We're all better off if Putnam's name is kept out of it."
"I see he's really keeping his nose clean."
"You could say that. You going to sew that one up"
"Soon as I finish packing him. Jesus, this guy has enough dope in him to supply New York for a month."
Morgan finished writing and put the papers back in the drawer and locked it. Then he took off his coat and walked toward the locker. Bolan watched as his face grew nearer.
"That's not my concern, Mike, my boy," said Morgan, his voice suddenly very near, filling the locker. "Not my concern."
Bolan's adrenaline started its pounding effect.
The gun felt good in his hands. Morgan pulled open the locker door and then dropped his coat in horror. The big bastard stepped from the locker, unwrapping his big frame even as he pressed the Colt M16 into Morgan's genital area. Morgan stopped breathing. He stared up into a pair of crazy blue eyes.
Mike was stitching, unaware of Bolan's presence.
"You got a lot of balls, running an operation like this, Morgan," Mike said. He pulled a long stitch through the kid's corpse.
Bolan cut the air with the voice of the guillotine. "Not much longer he hasn't. Drop the knife and get against the wall."
Mike turned, still holding the thread. Seeing Bolan, he obeyed. Morgan was wide-eyed, sweating and trembling. He tried to edge his genitals away from the gun barrel, but Bolan kept it jammed tight.
"Who is Putnam?"
Neither spoke.
Bolan pulled the hammer back with a resounding click.
"Tell me who Putnam is."
Morgan's voice shook. "Putnam is a guy, just a guy who tells me what to do. I don't know who he is."
"You lie to me again and I fire this thing."
Morgan stole a glance at Mike, then looked back at the big bastard holding the gun. His lips trembled.
A knock on the door. Bolan told Morgan to answer.
"It's me, Jones," said a voice through the door. "You finished yet?" The door swung open. A guard walked in, rifle slung over his shoulder.
He saw Bolan and cocked it, bringing it up to fire.
"Don't!" yelled Morgan.
Bolan pushed Morgan away and swung the Colt up to the guard. Bolan waited for a split second to see if the guard would fire.
The guard brought the gun up until it pointed at Bolan's face.
Bolan blew away the guard's face.
Mike whimpered in fear. He shook.
Bolan kicked each man in the head, swiftly and surely. He pulled the keys from Morgan's pocket, as the man slumped and groaned. A whistle blew shrilly somewhere in the building.
Bolan tore open the drawer and stuffed the papers into his shirt. Blood from the guard's head flowed between his boots in a crimson rivulet. Then came the sound of rushing feet.
Bolan slid out the workroom door. Two guards rounded the corner, SMG's at the ready. They pulled up to fire. Bolan sent the first spinning back with a roaring blast from the Colt. The second gunner tore the wall open with slugs. Bolan closed his eyes against the spray of hot plaster and crouched, then fired at the muzzle-flash. The room fell silent.
Sirens screamed across the tarmac. A troop carrier pulled up, guards spilling from the back. Bolan sprang, making for the other door.
In the bright heat outside, Bolan put on his mirror sunglasses and holstered his gun. The truck was idling, its driver ready.
Bolan walked up and shrugged. "I can't find that asshole anywhere," he said.
The driver looked down at him. "What the hell is going on, anyway?"
"I don't know," Bolan said, opening the door of the truck and yanking the driver out. The driver sprawled on the tarmac as Bolan shifted into gear and roared off.
There was a soft crack of billiard balls. Carpet spread beneath his feet.
There were women here.
Colonel Harlan Winters, known as "Howlin' Harlan" in the officer corps, looked up from his whiskey at the officers' club and nearly choked.
"Bolan," he managed to get out, "how the hell did you get in here?" Winters looked furtively around the room.
Bolan turned his back to the rest of the room and stood at ease beside Winters. From inside his shirt he withdrew a sheaf of papers. He lay them on the polished wood of the bar in front of Winters.
"You shouldn't have risked coming here."
"I'm safer here," replied Bolan.
"Jesus Christ," muttered Winters as he scanned the papers. "You were the one who blew open this heroin thing?"
"They accused me of killing Jim Naiman in order to shut me up," Bolan said.
Winters read on compulsively. Bolan stole a glance behind at the officers' club. They might have been in Nevada someplace, from the looks of it — carpeting, lamps, pool table. In the next room a movie was showing.
Sentimental music sounded through the wall. Bolan listened to the dialogue. A woman was trying to dissuade her soldier from going to war.
Bolan ordered a drink. Who was the actor?
Henry Fonda? No, Ronald Reagan.
The voices were distorted as they came through the wall.
"You're a special man, Bill. You have courage. More than I do, I guess. Please stay."
"I'm not so special. I just fight for what I believe. As long as there's a bully to fight, I'll be there..." The music swelled; they were probably kissing on an airstrip or a ship.
Winters whistled and looked up. Bolan caught the faint breath of whiskey.
"This is a dirty business, isn't it?"
"As dirty as it gets."
"Look, my advice is don't get too hot about it. I've been hearing rumors about the CIA transporting raw heroin for the Laotians in return for raids on VC camps inside the Laotian border. Maybe we need that."
"We don't need what we're getting now. The VC in the Mekong get anything they want — weapons, supplies, anything. The so-called intelligence we've been going on is useless. Our boys are getting slaughtered. Buddy knew it on that mission."
Winters took a thoughtful sip of his drink.
"You're right about the intelligence. I could do better with a Ouija board. But we can't let the VC keep Laos as their supply depot. Anyway, it's too late now. The whole thing is under official investigation."
"Who's doing the investigating?"
"The CIA. Top level, here in Saigon. Putnam himself is heading the investigation."
"Putnam?"
"What's the matter?" Winters had seen Bolan's face freeze.
Bolan felt a sense of desolation sweep through him, of justice torn and shredded, scattered to the winds.
"Putnam is the one running the operation." Winters threw up his arms. "Listen, Colonel," Bolan said urgently. "You have to stash those papers away until I find a way to get around Putnam. I'm dropping out of sight. I'm going back to the Mekong."
Winters leaned forward and looked piercingly at Bolan. "Don't go back to the Mekong now, Mack. Anywhere but there. We're getting casualties way beyond anyone's predictions. It's a mess, a bloodbath."
Through the wall came heroic music. Must be near the end of the movie, Bolan thought.
Winters continued uneasily. "You've been too much at the front line, Mack. You're starting to get that look in your eye."
"You know how it is as well as I do," said Bolan. "There is no front line. The front line is everywhere."
Winters stopped Bolan before he walked through the door. "Mack, be careful you don't go over the edge. Nam does that to people."
Bolan knew now, standing in that officers' bar, just how Buddy felt when he was shaving his head. "I'm already over the edge," he said.
Mosquito netting hung diaphanous in the moonlight. Bolan felt the fatigue working on his mind as he stood over the bed. He must be careful now. For a moment Buddy appeared in hallucination, squatting on the floor with his knife at Bolan's feet.
Bolan pulled back the netting. Vu Quoc Thanh lay sleeping. The moon mumped him with a corpselike pallor.
Bolan sat on the edge of the bed. Thanh shot upright, feeling for his gun.
Bolan grabbed him by the wrist until he gained his senses. Thanh wiped the sweat from his neck and torso, finally his face.
"What is the Council of Kings?" whispered Bolan.
Thanh faced him, the moon behind him glowing on his shoulders. His face was in darkness.
"The Council of Kings is the name given to those who run your war."
"The Pentagon?"
"No. Intelligence. The people who sell the war to the generals and the money-makers. The people who give your country a reason to send its youth to their deaths."
"What do they have to do with the heroin?"
Thanh waved the question away with a bony white hand.
"The heroin is a minor thing, useful to the Council for making deals, making money. But you and your people are being lied to. Many times I tried to warn the American intelligence people that the VC were strong — stronger than they could imagine. But they would not listen."
"Why not?"
"They wanted to tell their people that they could win the war. Now they are finding out that I was right, but they cannot admit it. For years I told them, but they ignored me."
"We can win it. If we can only cut off the VC supply routes..."
"You don't understand. This country has been invaded and occupied by foreign armies for thousands of years. The people here have always driven them out, sooner or later. Don't you understand? The only way to win this war is to kill every man, woman and child."
Bolan did not know what to say. He looked mutely at the figure crouching beside him.
"You have already started to do that," continued Thanh. "Look at what you do in the villages. Are you making friends there? You give the Vietcong more supporters everywhere your army goes."
"But the camps — we get more and more people in our camps..."
"Simply because the people must avoid the American bombs. You cannot promise these people anything that the French have not already promised. Look where it got the French. We will always win."
Bolan sat rooted to the bed. There was a heaviness in his limbs he had never felt before. He had suckered Thanh with his talk, and the guy had fallen for it.
"Did you say "we"?" asked Bolan.
"No," said Thanh, reaching for a cigarette. "I didn't."
Bolan sprang. With one big hand he smothered Thanh's face, pressing down into the bed. He rose over Tharth and sank his knee into the smaller man's gut.
"You joined them, didn't you, Thanh? It was you who got to Buddy first."
Thanh looked up at the big bastard who held his life in his hands. Bolan saw that his eyes held fear, but no more than fear. He could see that Thanh had expected it to end this way. Had expected it since childhood.
Bolan gently took out his knife and cut into Thanh's throat, holding him until the body stopped jerking.
Then he ransacked the room feverishly. In his pocket Buddy's ear began to twitch. Bolan ignored it. He knew it was fatigue and not reality, but all the same he felt the ear jump as if it were alive. Thanh's bowels had let go, and the room had begun to smell of the foulness of death.
Nothing escaped Bolan's hand. He knew the thing was somewhere in the room, though he could not say how he knew. From the bookshelf he withdrew a worn copy of Les Misgrables.
Holding it by the spine, he let the contents fall from between the leaves. It lay there on the desk, downy and tattered like a piece of litter.
Buddy's map.
Bolan sat in a padded chair, looking at a picture on Putnam's desk of the man's family at Disneyland. They were stuffing their faces with cotton candy. Bolan closed his eyes against the image. Morning sun glared through the office blinds. The door opened for a senior bureaucrat looking well groomed in a gray suit. Maybe he was taking someone to lunch. He crossed the room and thrust his hand toward Bolan, the essence of ease and authority.
"Dick Putnam. You're Johnson?"
"That's right," said Bolan. "Phil Johnson."
"You know something about this heroin thing?" asked Putnam, settling himself into his chair behind the fortress of a desk.
"Yeah," said Bolan. "I know a lot about it. I know you run the operation. You use the dead bodies of American soldiers to ship your heroin. I know you lie about the strength of the Vietcong. I know you get a lot of innocent kids killed or maimed for life." Bolan was surprised at his own sureness. He was a young man unused to going too far. Putnam's face had become a mask of hate and panic.
He sat immobilized. Bolan continued to drive words home like a jackhammer.
"You scar people. You use them for your own purposes and then kill them. You killed Naiman and blamed me for it. You use your position of trust as if it were your whore."
Putnam's eyes darted to the photo of his family.
Bolan drove on mercilessly. "You could say I know something about it. I lost a buddy because of you."
Furious, Putnam reached across the desk and grabbed the picture frame as a weapon. Bolan smashed his fist down on Putnam's, breaking the hand and shattering the glass and the frame that it held. Putnam cried out, his face white and twisted with pain, and he put his injured hand between his thighs.
Bolan reached around Putnam's throat and pulled him across the desk with a powerful jerk of his shoulder. Putnam lay wheezing, his head on the desk, the corners of his mouth wet with spittle.
"It's not me you want," the CIA man gasped. "I answer to others. Please..."
"I'll bet you answer to others," Bolan said. He spread his fingers around Putnam's neck and jaw and applied pressure. "What others?"
"The Council," Putnam hissed against the constriction around his throat.
"Who on the Council?"
Putnam looked at his assailant in panic. Bolan pressed down hard.
"Civilians," the guy squealed. "They're not soldiers... nothing to do with the war. Except Heiss. Karl Heiss..."
"And the civilians?"
"Gunrunners. Just gunrunners and money-men. They buy the heroin."
"Names." Bolan introduced more significant pressure.
"Marcello. Andriola. Canzonari. That's it...."
This rat was living up to its name. Bolan pulled the remains of the map from his pocket. Putnam clamped his jaws shut. Bolan loosened them with a punch to the temple, then pulled them apart until Putnam's fillings gleamed in the sun. "This is for Buddy," he said. "Don't you ever forget." Bolan pushed the map into Putnam's mouth and rammed it down his throat until Putnam gagged. Bolan turned to leave. At the door he looked back. Putnam rolled off the desk, his right hand hanging useless and discolored. The CIA man began to began to vomit, retching painfully.
"Chew that over with your Council of Kings," Bolan said. He slammed the door and marched down the corridor, moving purposefully out of there. Bolan knew a little more about himself now, a lot more about brotherhood and loss. And he knew for absolute sure that he would survive to shove injustice down the throats of many more vermin to come. He had heard the names — and had just heard the call. And he was still so damn near over the edge. So he prayed for his family, because he was scared, and he vowed that he would never voluntarily share this dreadful war with his kin, his mother and father, his sister, Cindy, and younger brother Johnny, all back home. And then Bolan prayed that in his personal war to come, the inevitable war seeded in this corruption called Vietnam, the enemy would be his and his alone. No buddies. And now, back to war. Back to Mohawk time in the Mekong...