Jungle Rules (58 page)

“Doing what?” Olsen asked, looking both ways down the bar.

“Stuff,” Pitts said, sipping his beer and then lighting a cigarette.

“I got to take a piss,” Olsen said, and got off his stool and walked to the back of the bar.

Brian Pitts watched him disappear behind the restroom door. When the older of the two men sitting at the bar also got up and went to the toilet, the Snowman got nervous. He left a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, gave Tam a nod to keep the change, and ducked out the main doorway.

As he left the Continental Hotel bar, a middle-aged Vietnamese woman wearing a black cocktail dress walked out the door behind him after the bartender gave her a nod.

“I told Tam to have him followed, just in case,” Sam Madison said to Bruce Olsen in the bathroom as they stood over the urinals.

“If he’s still there when I walk back to the bar, he may be just another jarhead out shooting off his lying mouth,” Olsen said with a laugh, zipping his pants. “He’s got something definitely dirty going on, though, asking me if I was a deserter, and then offering me a well-paying job because of my supply connections. Ten to one the guy’s tied to dope.”

“Dope’s tied to the Viet Cong,” Madison said, washing his hands. “Effective weapon. We have more and more of our guys using it. We’ll find out what this cat’s all about. Tam put his hit team on this guy. Their people will tie a can on his tail he can’t shake. We’ll pass the lowdown on this bum to DIA, or kick it over to General Cushman. Let his folks sort it out. If he’s tied to the Cong, which is a good bet, if he’s dealing serious dope, we might just whack this turd.”

Olsen laughed and dried his hands.

“Man, if this idiot only knew who sat at the same bar with him tonight when he breezed out his line of bullshit,” the SEAL said, shaking his head. “He wore expensive threads, a Rolex watch—not standard Marine Corps issue, my friend. His look spoke of dope loud and clear.”

Brian Pitts kept looking over his shoulder, and the woman in the black cocktail dress finally disappeared in a hotel door. He stopped and turned, and saw no one on the street, so he doubled back up the block and made a right, where Huong and Bao waited for him in the black Mercedes-Benz.

As he settled in the backseat he lit a cigarette and then pounded his fist on his knee, blowing out a big sigh. He had stepped way over the line tonight, and felt sick at knowing how badly he had allowed his ego to brag and jeopardize everything. That so-called SEAL supply guy could easily have been CID stalking a bar, looking for deserters or dope peddlers. He felt stupid for allowing his vanity, greed, and anxiousness to hurry the job of recruiting soldiers for his new army overwhelm his more characteristic good sense of caution and attention to detail.

Sometimes his vision got to pushing too hard, and he knew he had to keep that drive under control, working more methodically and carefully.

“No more fuckups like tonight,” he told himself as he sucked on his cigarette. He watched Huong and Bao both checking the mirrors and glancing in every direction, looking for anyone who might follow them.

“See anyone back there?” Pitts asked his senior cowboy as he steered the car westward toward the edge of the city.

“No, sir, just Vespa, but it turn left back by that last hotel,” Huong said. “One car come now, but it just pull from curb. No follow.”

“Good,” Pitts sighed, and took a relaxing drag off the smoke. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter 15

CHOPPER CREPT FROM the hole in the wall where the water pipe came through and ran overhead in the mojo’s office, across the hall, into the prosecution section, where it bent ninety degrees to the right, and then branched off to feed a deep sink in the utility room and traveled next door to supply water in the all-hands head. The roach flicked his antennae and then pulled them down, one at a time, using his front feet, and ran the wirelike appendages along his mouth, cleaning the dust particles from them. Then he tilted his knobby brown head and caught sight of the dry coffee creamer that Charlie Heyster had spilled on the black lacquer tray that held the jars of sugar, Carnation Coffeemate, and a stack of clean, white ceramic mugs next to the officers’ coffeepot.

The giant, northern Florida variety palmetto bug opened his wings, ready to fly down to partake of the inviting meal, but then caught sight of the man sitting at the desk below him. Chopper recognized the all-too-familiar bald spot on the back of the human’s head. Instead of just watching him eat the dry creamer and sugar, as the others always did, the ones who came in and cleaned the office, dumped the trash, and made the coffee, and talked to him like a house pet as he ate, this man and the fat fellow with the black and silver hair from the office next to this one, would scream and swat at him with manila folders or a rolled-up magazine. So the big roach eased back inside the hole, leaving his head poking out so he could watch, and waited for the obnoxious creature below him to leave. Then he could fly down to the tray and eat at his leisure.

Three years ago, the insect’s great-great-great-great-great grandmother, along with several of her closest friends and relatives, had set up housekeeping in the bottom of a case of toilet paper in a Jacksonville, Florida, warehouse. Someone had knocked a small hole through the cardboard near a bottom corner, giving the roaches free run in and out of the container, allowing them access to forage for grub outside the box while developing their colony among the rolls of soft paper. Then one day the case got trucked up to Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, where a C-141 Starlifter carried the box of toilet tissue and the nest of North Florida palmetto bugs to Da Nang Air Force Base in South Vietnam.

After a few days in this new country, where night and day seemed backward to the bugs, a small man put the big box in the back of a panel truck and drove it to the enlisted men’s head next to the First Marine Aircraft Wing legal office, and stacked the box with some others in a storage room lighted by the glow from the gas burner beneath a water heater. Chopper’s great-grandmother and her growing family ventured out and made their home inside the walls of this damp building. They found food plentiful and the climate ideal for their species, so they proliferated.

When Chopper hatched from his egg case, his great-grandmother had long since disappeared from the transplanted community of palmetto bugs. However, her hearty genetics in such a supportive and welcome environment produced a roach race that dwarfed any of their two-inch kin that remained in Florida. While among most communities of cockroaches, a three-inch-long male might seem rare, such size was now common among Chopper’s South Vietnamese kin.

The big roach watched as this man took a package wrapped in brown paper from inside a white laundry bag. He shook it and listened to its side, then he sniffed it like he might take a bite from the bread-loaf-size item. Seeing the human now absorbed with the object he held in his hands and shook again and smelled, Chopper eased himself out of the pipe hole and spread his wings, launching in a low, fluttering buzz a few feet above the desk, and then landed with a thud on the black lacquer tray. He managed to swallow three good mouthfuls of the dry creamer before the man leaped from his chair, shoved the paper-wrapped package back in the white cotton bag, and bellowed while grabbing a manila folder and running to the side table, where the cockroach dined on Coffeemate and sugar spillage.

As the shouting human swung the file folder, Chopper launched himself skyward, lit on the wall, took one look back, and flew to his pipe-hole nest.

“Staff Sergeant Pride!” Charlie Heyster screamed, trying to kill the elusive roach. “I thought base maintenance was supposed to spray this place last week! That damned cockroach is still here!”

“Sir,” Staff Sergeant Pride said breathlessly, “they did all they could.”

“This fucking roach probably thrives on Malathion, then,” Heyster said, now looking around for the bug. “He’ll be feeding on cats and small children before long, unless we kill the bastard. That asshole Kirkwood brought it in here, you know. Put it in my pipe tobacco, and now the fucking bug lives in my office.”

“Sir, Major Dickinson had his bouts with that roach, too, when he had your office,” Derek Pride said, reminding the new military justice officer about the screaming and furniture throwing that Dicky Doo had done before he moved into Colonel Prunella’s old office.

“Surely the damned thing will finally die from old age then,” Heyster said, spinning on his toes and swiveling his head 360 degrees, still looking for the roach that the enlisted Marines had come to call Chopper because of his enormous size and vague similarity to a helicopter. “How long do these bugs live, anyway?”

Pride shrugged his shoulders and looked at the major-select as he tied the drawstrings on the top of his dirty-clothes bag.

“Someone told me that big roaches like that can live for several years,” the staff sergeant said. “By the way, sir, I am heading to the laundry myself. Would you like me to drop that off for you?”

“Thanks, but no, Sergeant,” Heyster said, and blushed as he laid the white cotton bag on the floor by his chair. “I have to go out anyway. I’ll drop it myself.”

 
“HELLO, CAN YOU put me in touch with Bill Walters, please?” First Lieutenant Melvin Biggs said on the telephone, calling the Naval Investigative Service special agent who investigated the Brian Pitts look-alike murder. Gunnery Sergeant Jack Jackson sat in the Criminal Investigation Division office with his feet propped on his desk and a wide smile on his face as he read a copy of the message that had just come from Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii.

“Bill?” the lieutenant said after waiting for the investigator to answer the call. “Mel Biggs here at Three-MAF CID. We just got a message from the forensics lab at Hickam regarding the identification of the body we shipped to them a few months back, supposedly that of a Marine deserter named Pitts.”

The lieutenant nodded and listened as Agent Walters spoke.

“Right. Right, Pitts and Scott both had the same blood types, go figure the odds,” the lieutenant said. “Look here, they finally dug up an X-ray from Pitts’s dental records in boot camp. One of those wraparound films. According to the X-ray, Pitts had an impacted wisdom tooth on his lower left side. This tooth grew sideways into the roots of the molar next to it. The lad’s dental records show they extracted that tooth and another wisdom tooth at San Diego back in 1963, while he was in boot camp. This body has all its wisdom teeth, while Pitts had his pulled. Based on that and a perfectly healthy second upper molar on the right side of this body, compared to Pitts’s dental record showing he had a filling in that same tooth, the folks in the lab at Hickam say this body obviously is not that of Corporal Brian T. Pitts.”

Gunny Jackson laughed and slapped his leg.

“I told you so,” he said, and took a big drink of coffee.

Lieutenant Biggs waved at him and smiled.

“That’s correct, sir,” Biggs said. “They compared dental records of Michael Jerome Scott with those of the body and they have a pretty conclusive match. So the body is that of our missing lance corporal. It just took time to get the dental records in the hands of the forensics people in Hawaii. Didn’t take them fifteen minutes after they ran their comparisons. So, like you guys, we’re focusing our investigation on Pitts and his people as the primary suspects in Scott’s murder.”

Lieutenant Biggs sat up in his chair and looked at the gunnery sergeant seated at the desk across from him.

“Agent Walters, I want to put you on the speakerphone so that Gunny Jackson can hear what you just told me,” the lieutenant said, and flipped a switch on the front panel of a six-inch-wide, slotted, gray plastic box that sat next to the telephone on the corner of his desk.

“Right, Mel,” Walters said over the speaker. “This news of yours, as far as I’m concerned, confirms the identity of a character that the CIA put a tag on in Saigon. Defense Intelligence Agency passed the information through channels, and I got it this morning. This person of interest that they’re watching matches the Snowman’s description to a tee. It seems that our friend Brian Pitts has tried to masquerade as an ICEX operator. Unfortunately for him, Pitts picked the wrong guy to shine on: an actual Phoenix ninja, a navy SEAL. Get this: Pitts tried to recruit the guy.”

“What did they do?” Gunny Jackson said in a loud voice so it would carry on the squawk box. “The CIA folks?”

“One of the senior supervisors of ICEX happened to sit just down the bar at the time, watching the curious meeting unfold, so he put a covert surveillance team on our wayward friend’s ass,” Walters said and laughed. “Pitts is royally screwed, sports fans. Our NIS bureau in Saigon has people going out there now, with a company of soldiers from the Tenth Infantry Division. The surveillance team has indicated that Pitts and a couple of other deserters have linked up with Viet Cong elements, probably dope connections. So forces down south in coordination with our naval investigative people and this Phoenix team will pull a full-out special-operations raid on the location and surrounding area. If the Snowman survives the onslaught, you should have him in custody up here within the week.”

 
WHEN TERRY O’CONNOR saw Charlie Heyster stroll down the sidewalk toward the wing legal office’s general-use jeep, swinging the laundry bag in his hand, he dashed out the building’s side door and ran as hard as he could to the enlisted barracks, where Movie Star Dean lay on his rack talking to a pair of his buddies from the wing and two divisions’ joint public information office.

“I need a jeep that Captain Heyster won’t recognize if it follows him!” O’Connor said, gasping for breath as he looked at the driver.

“Yo, sir, what’s up?” Movie Star answered, jumping to his feet and grabbing his hat.

“Captain Heyster, I want to follow him, but I don’t want him to see me,” O’Connor said, and looked at the two Marines from the information office.