Slash and Burn (17 page)

Siri and Phosy took a moment to play with Bok then sat with his father and the elders. As was customary, they drank some herbal brew and stared around appreciatively at mother nature before getting to the point.

“How did you know when to take your dragon’s tail to Spook City?” Phosy asked. Ar acted as spokesman.

“The sorceress told us before she died that there would be a sign,” he said.

“Did she tell you a date? Make a map?”

“No,” Ar and the elders laughed. “She was blind by then. She said one day the dragon’s daughter would come and ask for her father’s tail back and we’d have to return it.”

“And she did?”

“Two moons ago. She arrived in the village one afternoon. Just walked in out of the jungle with her bodyguards as if from nowhere. She looked like us, dressed like us, but she spoke a strange language. There was a girl here then who could speak Lao—she’s gone now, went to find work in the city—but even she had trouble understanding what the woman was saying. She was beautiful. Her face had been painted by the gods. She asked if we had any wreckage from an explosion. When we told her about the dragon’s tail she asked to see it. When we took her to the meeting hall we could see in her eyes how happy she was. We knew she was the dragon’s daughter.”

Phosy could tell from the headman’s expression that he didn’t buy in to all this dragon hooey. He was merely keeping the old men happy.

“Did the dragon’s daughter stay overnight?” Phosy asked.

“No, brother.”

“Did she have a camera?”

“I didn’t see one.”

“Did you ever leave her alone with the dragon’s tail?”

“Of course. It was only right. She needed some time to honor her father. Before she left she told us that someone would come from the government. That we should tell them about the tail. But we’d promised our sorceress we’d deliver it in person. So when the cadre came by in her stiff uniform and told us about your visit, we loaded the tail onto a litter and set off for Long Cheng. We left it a bit late. We only had two weeks to get there.”

Phosy and Siri consulted.

“Do you know of a place upstream where there are dark rocks on a sand bank?” Phosy asked.

“Of course.”

“Some of the rocks form a word … a shape.”

“The rocks move all the time. The river swells and pushes them here and there.”

“So if someone made a shape with the rocks this year…?”

“It would probably be moved along by the next rainy season.”

“Comrade Ar, apart from the dragon’s daughter, do you remember seeing anyone out of place? Anyone who really shouldn’t be here?”

Ar laughed.

“Brother Phosy, that would be us.”

“So, who do you think she was?” Daeng asked. “The dragon’s daughter?”

They were all in the rear of the truck bumping along the trail back to Phonsavan. Not even five and the truck had its headlights on.

“Well, if this was two moons ago, it could technically have been after the budget announcement and before the photos were sent to Bangkok,” Siri told her, his words arriving in an asthmatic squeak.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she had an instamatic stuffed down her bra,” said Civilai.

“Takes a picture of the tailplane,” said Siri, “moves the rocks, secretes the newspaper. She’s undoubtedly the person who’s orchestrating this whole prisoner-of-war story.”

“So you’re convinced it’s fabricated?” Daeng asked.

“Of course it is. Who on earth would want to keep an American pilot locked up for ten years? This mystery woman would have to be someone who knew of Boyd and his connection to the senator. It would have to be someone who’d met Boyd during the war.”

“Or it could be Boyd himself,” said Daeng.

“Good, now you’re into the spirit of things,” said Civilai. “A pilot survives for ten years, unseen in the jungles of Laos. Then one day a copy of the newspaper drops out of the sky and he reads about his father’s good fortune. Where’s he going to find a copy of the
Bangkok Post
?”

“Thailand.” Siri and Daeng said it at the same time.

“Ha,” said Civilai. “I see it. You’re just attempting to muscle in on my Hollywood deal. Boyd abseils from a crashing helicopter then walks sixty kilometers to Thailand through hostile enemy-controlled territory.”

“This isn’t all enemy territory,” Daeng reminded him. “He’d be just as likely to meet an ally. There were plenty of friendly villagers around who’d be happy to help out a nice young American boy.”

“If that were so, why wouldn’t he get himself returned to his base?”

“Embarrassment for trashing one of their choppers?” Daeng suggested.

“Or, perhaps he didn’t want to go back,” said Siri.

“A deserter?” said Civilai in mock horror. “I thought he was supposed to be a model soldier. No black marks.”

“Something was troubling him that night,” said Siri. “Something made him act out of character. Perhaps he was afraid to go back.”

“What if the crash wasn’t an accident?” said Daeng. “What if somebody wanted him dead?”

“All right.” Civilai put up his hands. “I give up. I’ll go sixty–forty with you. No more. But I want first billing on the credits and ‘Based on an original idea by Civilai Songsawat’ somewhere up there on the screen.” They shook hands to seal the deal.

Only Lit didn’t join in the laughter.

“You’re all missing the obvious,” he said.

“And what would that be?” Phosy asked.

“That you’re all so intrigued by the fantastic you aren’t seeing the simple. If you could look beyond the dragons and their relatives and the exploding moon and blind sorceresses you’d see it too. Your sweet little Phuan village is the hub of all this intrigue. How about this? Your pilot crashes but he survives. The villagers capture him, take pictures of him and the helicopter tail, and wait for an opportunity to cash in on their good fortune.”

“For ten years?” Phosy laughed.

“And how exactly are they cashing in?” Daeng asked.

“You wait, madam. I bet you a silver bangle they’ll miraculously discover his remains. The pilot’s father, in gratitude, will reward them handsomely. Or they’ll suddenly remember there’s a grave site and they’ll charge to take you there. Just you wait.”

Everyone wanted to argue, Phosy in particular, but nobody did. Thus far, it was no less logical than any other theory.

18

A US REPUBLICAN SENATOR IN A LOCKED ROOM

They’d washed off the dust of the day and were changing for dinner. Dtui noticed that her husband had been even more subdued than usual since their return to the Friendship. He’d told her about the events of their field trip but with no real enthusiasm.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Not really.”

“Phosy?”

“I … he said you were strong-willed.”

“Who?”

“Your security commander fellow.”

“He did? When?”

“When Daeng explained you were working with the Americans today.”

“Well, that’s a compliment, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. If you don’t take it to mean stubborn, as in, ‘If she hadn’t been so stubborn she could have had me instead.’”

Dtui smiled to herself.

“Oh. But he didn’t actually utter those words?”

“It was unstated.”

Dtui
nopp
ed a thank you to the heavens.

“Inspector Phosy, you’re jealous.”

“I am not … of him? Huh. Just….”

“What?”

“Why didn’t you tell me it was him?”

“What was him?”

“That he was the one you met in Vieng Xai.”

“It didn’t occur to me. Didn’t seem that important.”

Phosy was doing a bold job of keeping his emotions in check. He smiled till cracks appeared in his cheeks.

“Not important? He asked you to marry him.”

“Oh, comrade policeman,” she giggled. “If I had to point out every man who’s ever proposed to me we’d never make it through a day. Now, shall we go?”

She stood, opened the door and sniffed his flushed cheek as he passed her.

The dinners which had begun four days earlier as such jolly affairs had taken on the air of refueling stops. Although still available, the Johnny Red was not flowing nearly as freely and the diners were more concerned about the quality of the air than that of the food. Officially, Civilai was still not in the inner circle of those who attended the autopsy but of course, like Madame Daeng, he had been told all about it. Siri was waiting for an opportunity to introduce them into the group without betraying the trust of the Americans. So it was decided that this evening Civilai, with Peach as his interpreter, would do what he did best. Hard as it may have been to believe, especially for those who only knew him outside the Politburo, the old man was a diplomat of the first order. He could schmooze with the best of them; dally with dictators and tango with tyrants. He could make despots in the most constricting ideological girdles take a breath. He had been granted an audience with Senator Vogal. As the senator had hardly left his room since what he was liberally calling “the assassination attempt,” it was no surprise that Ethel Chin had ordered room service. Civilai would be joining them for an after-meal tête-à-tête.

For the others the meal experience was accomplished barely half an hour after it began. Siri and Bpoo, Dtui and Phosy accompanied Dr. Yamaguchi to the room of Secretary Gordon. Ugly took up a guard position outside the door. Inside they upended the bed to lean against the wall and used all the available floor space to spread out their paperwork. Mr. Geung was given the very special role of lookout. He stood between the curtain and the window pane and if anyone came near he would cough loudly. Originally they had told him to whistle but that and nuclear physics were two skills he hadn’t yet mastered. Auntie Bpoo went into the bathroom and didn’t come out for a very long time.

“All right, what do we have?” Siri asked. His voice had developed an embedded growl like that of a street dog attempting to speak human.

The main points had already been listed during the long day of research. All Dtui needed to do was read from her notes then check with the Americans to see if they had reactions to the Lao comments. Meanwhile, Yamaguchi and Gordon continued to work their ways through the unread files.

“First,” Dtui said, “were the documents that had been sent to the US embassy in Bangkok. They explained the rationale for the initial MIA joint action. Not surprisingly, the letter from the senate committee said that the approval of the rice budget would be totally dependent on the Lao agreeing to this mission. No MIA, no rice. But, as you’ve since discovered, at that stage they hadn’t finalized the name of a flier to go after. They acknowledged that most of the missing airmen had been lost in Vietnam but saw Laos as a back door for getting permission for similar actions with the Socialist Party of Vietnam. When Boyd’s name came up there was obviously talk of a conflict of interest given the relationship with the senator, but I get the feeling they didn’t have that many downed pilots to choose from. Certainly none with empirical evidence like a photo. They needed success so they selected Boyd. We’ve got his CV. He was a smart lad. Clean service record with the marines. Selected for ‘special missions’ by Air America.”

“Any idea what that means?” Siri asked.

“The classified stuff didn’t make it into the reports. But there was some evidence. Gordon and Yamaguchi noticed discrepancies in Boyd’s flight records. The pilots were paid by the mission. They got ten dollars an hour, which is about what I get a month, so most pilots kept very detailed logs. But not Boyd. His first year was normal, every hour accounted for. But by the second year these empty blocks started to appear. Whole weeks where he didn’t claim any flying time at all.”

“Could he have been on vacation?” Phosy asked.

“Nope. His vacation time was clearly marked on his time sheets. Plus there was no record of him traveling out of the region. People on vacation don’t hang around in a war zone. This was all unexplained dead time. So we assumed ‘special missions’ meant he was doing something secret for the CIA. That’s why Gordon would like to ask your permission to bring in Sergeant Johnson. He thinks we need some inside military information and he believes the sergeant can be trusted.”

Siri had his window. He agreed to Johnson in exchange for Civilai, and, with a little push, Madame Daeng was included in the package.

“All we have left is the background report from Air America,” Dtui continued. “That mostly talks about the loss of the helicopter. The mystery of how it could just vanish completely. There were comments about Boyd’s state of mind from other pilots back in the base at Udon in Thailand. They all seemed to like him. Said he was a good flier. For the first year he was one of the boys, joined in, friendly. But some commented that for the last three months he’d started to act strangely. Some said he’d become paranoid. He used to be a two-drink-a-night man. Said he didn’t like booze that much. But toward the end he was matching them drink for drink and all these odd rants started. He’d say how they shouldn’t be surprised if he found a deadly cobra in his bunk. Or if he was shot down by friendly fire some day. He said ‘they’ were after him.”

“Did he say who ‘they’ were?” Siri asked.

“No. The other pilots assumed it was … us, the enemy.”

“All right,” said Phosy. “What’s—”

He was interrupted by heavy coughing from behind the curtain. The conspirators lowered their voices.

“What is it, hon?” Dtui asked.

“I … I swallowed a bug,” said Mr. Geung. “Sorry.”

When she’d stopped laughing, Dtui continued with her notes.

“That brings us to the interviews,” she said. “We have incomplete transcripts for the interviews with Nino Sebastian, the Filipino flight mechanic, and David Leon, the senior flight person at Spook City. They were the last two to see Boyd alive, unless you count the bear. There were two interviews with Sebastian; one by the AA investigator shortly after the crash, and another sponsored by Congressman Bowry and conducted by a private detective in the Philippines. That interview ran out to forty sheets. The congressman released only twelve of those to the MIA committee. Six of those twelve are marked on the file as ‘On loan to Major Potter.’ As you might imagine, the six we’re left with don’t say very much. We learn that Boyd and Sebastian had flown together on around forty occasions. That afternoon they’d flown the chopper directly up from Udon in Thailand with cargo that was labeled ‘Refugee Supplies’ due for Ban Song. Then we cut sixteen pages to Sebastian stoned and drunk in a bear cage wondering where his pilot’s gone.”

“But what that
does
tell us is that both the pilot and the mechanic were out of control,” said Phosy. “Hence the crash. Doesn’t sound like foul play to me.”

“According to the regulations, AA flight crews weren’t allowed to drink or mess with intoxicants up-country,” Dtui told him. “Somebody there got our boy stoned. That could be construed as foul play.”

“What about the AA interview?” Siri asked.

“Six pages in total. All but one signed out to Major Potter. That one page suggests that Sebastian was cut up about not having done enough to save his young friend’s life. He didn’t say who supplied the LSD. He blamed himself for getting dragged into the drink session and for not saying no to the drugs. Plus the fact he’d left open the bear cage and next morning the hungover beast attacked four locals before they could subdue it.”

“Nothing worse than a bear with a sore head,” Siri nodded.

“AA agreed with Sebastian’s appraisal of himself and fired him. He scratched around Thailand doing odd mechanic work before heading back to the Philippines with his savings. He and his family opened a service station and café. He stayed there till his death.”

“When did he die?” Phosy asked.

“Three weeks ago,” said Dtui. “There was a sticker attached to the front of the interview sheet.”

“Cause?”

“He drowned. There was a storm drain at the bottom of his property. They found him face down in the water.”

“You said there was another interview?” Siri asked.

“David Leon. Senior flight mechanic at Long Cheng. He was one of the witnesses who heard the explosion. Talked about Mike Wolff, the pilot who’d been drinking with Boyd and Sebastian that night. Explained that Wolff was shot down a couple of weeks later. They’d recovered his body. Ten page interview. Four pages released to Major Potter. Leon had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam but lost his licence, and the reason for that isn’t anywhere in the files.”

“But there was no interview organized by the congressman for this man?” Siri asked.

“No. Leon had been hired directly by the embassy in Vientiane to work with the Ravens—the forward air command. The embassy conducted the interview. There was just the one. Why?”

“I don’t know. Boyd’s father hires a private detective in the Philippines to interview one mechanic—forty pages worth—but isn’t interested enough to interview the only other witness there that night. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Perhaps he died before they could interview him,” Dtui suggested.

“He’s dead too?” Siri asked.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“About the same time as Sebastian. In fact there was a couple of days between the two deaths.”

“He didn’t fall into a storm drain, by any chance?”

“No. He had a heart attack in a go-go bar in Thailand.”

“Oh.” Siri gasped and coughed. “This is far too much of a coincidence for my liking. No wonder Major Potter found something smelly here.”

“I think the fact that we didn’t find any of those released papers in the major’s belongings is relevant,” said Phosy. “Whoever killed him helped himself to those.”

“It also makes you wonder whether Judge Haeng was looking for them too,” said Siri.

“You think Justice might be involved in all this?” Daeng asked.

“I don’t know. Haeng was looking for something he didn’t find. He’d been in Potter’s room earlier. And he’s been acting like the Americans’ own private little Pekinese all week. He’s up to something.”

“You think he’s being nice to them so he can have them killed one by one without being suspected?” Daeng asked.

“No. I believe the killer of Major Potter was a completely different animal to whoever took a potshot at the senator.”

Phosy agreed.

“You think we have two different assassins?” Daeng asked.

“Maybe three if you include the post office tower explosion.”

It was time to bring Dr. Yamaguchi and Gordon into the discussion.

*

Meanwhile, deep in the west wing, Civilai had chuckled and hmm’d and ahah’d through thirty minutes of Senator Vogal eulogizing himself to heaven and back. Ethel Chin was always at the senator’s side. From this close proximity it was clear why she had joined the senator in isolation. The stress of events at the Friendship, or perhaps just the unpleasantness of being in such a nasty place, had brought her lower face out in hives. She’d pasted a layer of make-up over it but the damage to her skin was plain to see. She sat at the desk purportedly reading a book but with such lack of commitment as to look up with a laugh at all the senator’s jokes. Not a minute into the meeting, Civilai had become the American’s best friend. The senator had already shared two tearful “not even my family knows this” moments.

On the rare occasion that Civilai was allowed a few seconds to respond to a question, he did so with a respect and humility that made Peach’s nostrils flare. After exactly twenty-eight minutes, there came a knock on the door and Rhyme entered with his flash unit attached to a cumbersome hunk of equipment and he took several photos of the elder statesmen in conversation. Ironically, in the photos, the senator appeared to be listening intently to Civilai’s thoughts. Rhyme’s departure was clearly designed to be the end of the dialogue. Vogal stood at the door bidding farewell and nodding at Civilai who remained seated. Peach stood then sat down again. Ethel Chin rolled her eyes. Reluctantly, the senator closed the door, locked it, and returned to his perch on the end of the bed, making a pointed study of his wristwatch. It wasn’t as if he had somewhere to go. Civilai decided it was time to probe.

“Peach,” he smiled, “ask the senator what type of family it takes to produce such a noble and intelligent son.”

“Do I have to?”

“Please.”

The senator beamed when he heard the question and settled happily into the role of interviewee.