Deep Doo-Doo
First thing the next morning I tried to play it cool, not mentioning Prasert when I stopped by Chaplain Kirkgartner’s office and showed him Dah’s letter. He warned me that this wasn’t going to be easy. Even if Tukada’s husband could be located, he might challenge her fitness as a mother. Kirkgartner asked me if I was sure she was up to raising her daughter alone. I wasn’t sure but I said yes anyway and he told me he’d press on with locating her husband’s commander. I wasn’t taking any chances, however. I found Jack Wu at the motion picture lab and asked him to pass the Korea APO address along to his Air Police friends. I had just headed over to the ComDoc camera trailer when Lieutenant Hill and First Sergeant Link pulled up in the Rat Pack jeep and told me to climb in. Tom Wheeler was already sitting in the back seat, looking none too happy. Before I knew it, we had parked in front of the Little Pentagon and were being escorted up the front steps and around the promenade toward Colonel Grimsley’s office. “If this is about the complaint on the Commander’s Hot Line,” I prattled, “I can assure you it was a practical joke. We never thought anyone was really putting arsenic in the chow-hall coffee, right, Tom?”
Tom was intent on something else. “That’s right, sir,” Tom answered glumly. “Whatever he said.”
“Seriously, what seems to be the problem, Lieutenant?”
“You’re the problem, once again,” replied Link, pushing open the door and leading us into the outer office.
Hill announced himself to the receptionist, then gazed back at us coldly. “Looks like you guys finally hit the big time.”
It didn’t look good when we stepped inside. Colonel Grimsley sat there imposingly, tapping his pen on the desk and looking like he’d prefer to be in the cockpit of his old F-105. His beady-eyed vice-commander, another full-bird colonel, stood on his right giving us a thorough once-over, sternly looking for dress-code violations. A tough young captain, commander of the Air Police squadron, stood on Grimsley’s left with what looked like a high-ranking Thai national police officer standing beside him. Link and Hill reported in, saluting sharply. Tom and I mimicked them as best we could. Grimsley slid a picture to our side of the desk. Snorting more than breathing, he asked, “Either of you know this man?”
My heart sank when I picked up a black-and-white photograph of Prasert. I handed it to Tom, who studied it for a moment in strained silence. The colonel harrumphed impatiently. Tom finally answered, “It’s possible that’s the brother of a massage girl I know down at Niko’s. Unfortunately, it also looks like about a hundred other people I’ve seen around Thailand in the past year.”
Grimsley snatched the photo out of his hand. “Cut the crap, airmen. His unit reported him missing yesterday. Sergeant Prasert Maneewatana. AUA records show he was registered in your night-school class, Leary. The Thai national police think he may be connected to the assassination attempt on the governor yesterday.”
“Sergeant Prasert is a serious English student. He never talked politics. I hope the governor is okay,” I said meekly, glancing at the Thai policeman, noticing how lean and fit he seemed for a man in his forties.
“The governor will recover,” said the officer.
“Thanks in some measure at least to the American-made flak jacket we provided him just last month,” the Air Police captain added smugly.
I was afraid to open my mouth and opened it anyway. “If this is Sergeant Prasert we’re talking about, I think we can clarify his disappearance, sir. You, see, he really has a sister, but she doesn’t work at Niko’s anymore. She’s got a problem—”
“She’s been strung out on heroin—off and on—for years, it seems,” Tom said. “Her brother came around last night looking for her. Said she was on the needle this time.”
I picked up the story. “Pretty good chance that he found her last night and took her home to her family before the police locked her up. She’s got a baby to look after—a Thai jail could be a real problem.”
I glanced at the Thai police officer, who wasn’t about to play his hand.
“And did she ever mention where it is her family lives?’ asked Grimsley.
“It might have been Phrae,” I replied.
“Or was it Takhli?” Tom added.
“Apparently their father has two wives, possibly sisters, who get along better by living in two different towns in two different provinces,” I tried to explain.
Grimsley looked at the police captain, who looked at the Thai officer. “We will investigate,” the Thai pronounced solemnly.
“Will that be all, sir?” asked Hill.
“That will be all—for now.”
Tom stopped as we reached the door. “Sir? Do they know who attempted to assassinate the governor? Isn’t there a chance, if it was VC terrorists or the like, that with the bicycle race and all, they might—”
“Major Pradit?” Grimsley interrupted. “Can you please educate Airman Wheeler?”
“The assassination attempt was the work of a renegade opposition party,” the Thai officer replied authoritatively. He smiled at Tom’s poor grasp of regional politics. “The Viet Cong operate in South Vietnam, Airman Wheeler, fighting the South Vietnamese government. There are no VC within a hundred and fifty miles of Ubon. The Pathet Lao are trying to bring down the Laotian government and North Vietnamese Army units are operating on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but that is all over a hundred miles away, high in the Annamite Mountains on the other side of the Mekong. I can assure you there are no insurgents operating in Thailand.”
“In-tell says the same thing, sir,” added the captain.
“Sir, why were we on standby alert then back in November?” Tom asked.
Colonel Grimsley leaned forward, smiling at us paternalistically. “The alert in November? That’s just regs—we’ve got to have one every few months, that’s all. Kind of like a fire drill in elementary school.”
“But what about the mortar rounds and gunfire out along the perimeter?”
It was a touchy subject for Grimsley. The Air Police captain jumped in. “That was friendly fire, Airman. Somebody shot at a palm tree shadow and all hell broke loose.”
“It didn’t sound friendly. Couldn’t a saboteur have started it?”
“I’m afraid your imagination has gotten the best of you,” said Grimsley.
“We investigated it thoroughly,” the captain added.
“But what about the firefight out on the flight line?” I interjected.
“That’s still under investigation,” said the captain. “They were wearing local peasant’s pajamas and had no ID, but it’s looking like a rogue unit of North Vietnamese rangers.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Tom sighed.
When Tom and I got over to the chow hall a little after noon, we spotted Woody Shahbazian and Jack Wu having lunch together and decided to join them. Shahbazian was looking though Wu’s slides and prints of an elephant training school in Chiang Mai, at the same time describing a conversation he had just had with Indian Joe downtown. “Far out,” he gasped, holding up a little one-slide viewer. “You can see the veins in the trainer’s eyeballs. That thousand-millimeter lens really gets you in there, doesn’t it!”
Wu smiled proudly, happy he had finally found someone who appreciated the greatness of his photography.
“As I was saying,” Shahbazian continued, “this dude, Indian Joe, asks me if I can get my hands on a flak jacket. Can you imagine that?”
I was having trouble picking up on the drift of their conversation, but I noticed that at the mention of the word “flak jacket” Tom’s face had gone blank. “Hey Brendan,” asked Shahbazian, “any of your buddies at Spectre got a flak jacket they can spare? Maybe double up, something like that. Seems this Thai business associate of Indian Joe’s is going out of his gourd. He’s certain the governor’s henchmen are going to wipe him out for being connected to one of the opposition parties. Indian Joe will pay two hundred American dollars for it—just cut me in for a 10% finder’s fee.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said as I started to eat.
Tom got up and walked out, leaving his tray on the table. “What’s with him?” asked Shahbazian.
“He’s been a little touchy since we got caught in that crossfire yesterday. Wasn’t in his job description as a clerk-typist.”
The regular programming on AFTN Radio was interrupted by Sergeant Sagittarius: “Only twenty-four more days till the Big Buddha Bicycle Race!”
I stopped by the editing room after lunch to see Zelinsky, who was running the latest sync-sound Spectre footage on his Moviola. A giant explosion lit up the screen as an oil truck was destroyed. Colonel Strbik’s gravelly voice could be heard on the sound track, shouting, “Golly, gee-wickers, we’ve got us a very prodigious BURNER—”
“Wow-ee!” cried Major Horney. “That’s a mind-boggling secondary! And she is still burning very prettily…”
Wheeler must have been keeping an eye out for me from his desk in the orderly room. Before I had a chance to ask Zelinsky about the latest numbers on the race, Wheeler burst in. There was no Buddha smile. He looked edgy. “Guys, I gotta talk to you.”
Zelinsky shut off the Moviola. “Yeah?”
“There’s something funny going on—I think you should call off the bicycle race. I wanted to talk to you and Jack Wu at lunch, Brendan, but—”
“You know how much money is riding on this right now?” asked Zelinsky. “Between entrance fees and bets, Sagittarius has over five thousand bucks sitting in his safe, and we’re just getting started.”
I jumped in. “Tom, after all we’ve been through—the peace marches and the road trips back home and our all-night rap sessions here—how could you bail when we’re so close to pulling off our greatest accomplishment, something we can be really proud of?”
“I’ve got a bad feeling, guys—I think local insurgents and the North Vietnamese regular army might be linking up the way they have in Vietnam and Laos.”
Zelinsky laughed. “You’ve got a bad feeling? Come on, Tom! The war’s winding down. You think any self-respecting Thais are gonna let a bunch of V fuckin’ C go marching through Ubon Province when they can collect a two-hundred-dollar bounty for every one they turn in?”
“It’s not the VC, Zelinsky. A Thai police major explained it to us this morning—the VC are in Nam and the Pathet Lao are in Laos. But he was dead wrong about Thailand. He said there’s no insurgency here, but I think the assassination attempt on the governor and the attacks on the base and even the train robberies near Surin are connected.”
“The Red Alert was a false alarm!” Zelinsky laughed nervously.
“We don’t know that for sure. The Viet Cong over in Nam carry away their dead and wounded all the time. And there’s no doubt about the day after Christmas. They hit.”
“Yeah,” I said reassuringly, “and they got wiped out, remember?”
Tom wasn’t buying it. “A friend of mine over at In-tell claims there’s an NVA light division hanging out in the jungle not forty miles from here, trying to decide whether to kick our asses or slide on down to Cambodia.”
Zelinsky switched on the Moviola. The screen lit up with napalm dropped from a flight of Night Hawk F-4s, liquid fire sloshing over the remains of a fifteen-truck convoy. “What the hell does In-tell know? We got two hundred sorties going out of here every twenty-four hours, day and night. You think they’re gonna overlook a full division?”
“You may be right, but I’m dropping out of the syndicate just the same. Lek thought this was crazy from the get-go, and I think, as usual, that her street smarts are more dependable than In-tell.”
“Tom,” I pleaded. “We’re doing a great thing here! Why don’t you sleep on it?”
Instead of an answer, though, all I got was the tinny sound of the trailer door slamming in my face.
“You think smoking all that grass is making him paranoid?” asked Zelinsky.
“I think that Tom’s judgment has been pretty shaky for a while now. What the hell was he thinking getting himself strung out on red rock? And then getting Tukada strung out. He’s been screwing up big time. I mean, even if he didn’t get her started, he sure kept her going.”
I wondered if Tukada had gone underground with Prasert or if she was going to keep her promise and come back. If she was out of the picture, I couldn’t help blaming Tom. Sure, there was plenty of blame to go around—Dave, Mole, drug-dealing Papa-sahns, life, Tukada’s ersatz captain, Tukada herself—but I expected more of Tom. Sadly, my anger at Tom was the only anger I could direct at anyone, and I couldn’t say anything about any of this to Zelinsky. When it occurred to me that I hadn’t answered Zelinsky’s question, I told him, “I think you might be right about too much dope. But I’ll be goddamned if I let a lovable pothead-turned-heroin-addict talk the rest of the syndicate into canceling what’s probably the greatest thing any of us have accomplished in our lives.”
I was fired up when I left Zelinsky in the editing trailer, and I felt good climbing on my bike for the ride home, but pedaling along the perimeter road on the way to the main gate I was suddenly overtaken and forced off the road by a jeep that skidded to a halt in front of me. “What the hell!” I screamed.
It was Link, looking plenty unhappy. “Listen up, Leary. And don’t try getting your friend Liscomb to dig you out of this pile of shit.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Word’s come down that you’re poking around, asking about your tii-rahks’s husband—or maybe it’s her future ex-husband. Doesn’t matter. They’re both smack-heads. Not nice people. And you’re fucking up a major investigation. So clear out, Leary. Nothing good will come of it.”
I changed into civvies back at Ruam Chon Sawng and tried to prepare my lesson for AUA, but I was too distracted by thoughts of Tom, Link, Prasert and Tukada and the drama of the past two weeks to concentrate. My heart wasn’t in my teaching that night and I wrapped up class early. I hurried home to wait for Tukada, hoping she would keep her promise and knowing she wouldn’t. I read for a while but soon got groggy. I took a quick shower to try to freshen up and put on a clean T-shirt and boxer shorts. I tried turning off the light and getting some sleep, but my eyes kept staring at the double and triple shadows circling on the ceiling above the fan. I got up again and pulled on my jeans and a pair of flip-flops. Outside, I unchained my bike, dragged it down the stairs, and rode aimlessly through the empty back streets of Ubon, passing the Siam Hotel and pausing a moment to glance through the gate at the empty swimming pool before continuing downtown to the Ubon Hotel. I wandered inside, almost sleepwalking, sitting for a moment in the downstairs bar, ordering a coffee and then getting up abruptly without finishing it and riding the elevator to the ninth floor. It was hauntingly empty, that limbo time after the respectable citizens of Ubon finished their dinners and before the whores and GIs started rolling in for after-hours imbibing. Climbing back on my bicycle, I rode along the side streets parallel to Route 66, absent-mindedly passing Miss Pawnsiri’s family compound and then crossing the highway to Tukada’s decaying villa. I parked my bike and walked over to the gate. There wasn’t even a candle lit inside. I walked around the house, peering occasionally over the wall, but nothing changed—the house was dark and empty. I rode back home to Ruam Chon Sawng and crawled into bed. I finally fell asleep, but before I did, I knew my chronic exhaustion had grown deeper yet.