Soldier of Fortune Magazine Presents: Missing by Choice 0812512065, 9780812512069

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If I was going to do any good for myself or Christy, I was going to have to do something for the pain in my head. I sat down, leaned back against the bamboo bars, and con-

centrated on the spot at the back of my skull that was hurting so bad. It took a long time before I could get enough of those brain chemicals circulating in my blood to give me a hint of relief, but finally it started to work. As the pain got a bit more bearable, my mind started to wander. I thought back to a recent morning in Seattle, and the shriveled old man who had started Christy and me down the trail. I had been so sure it was going to be nothing but a well-paid snipe hunt. I was personally positive that there weren't any Americans being held prisoner in cages someplace in Southeast Asia. I was wrong. There’s at least one American in a cage in Southeast Asia. Me!

SOLDIER OF SeFORT UNE

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

MISSING BY CHOICE Copyright © 1987 by Omega Group, Ltd.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

First printing: April 1987

A TOR Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN: 0-812-51206-5 CAN. ED.: 0-812-51207-3 Printed in the United States of America

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We got kidnaped at about 11:30 in the morning. Even before that, things had turned shitty. We had problems with the rental car; we missed a turnoff; and the little girl turned up missing. With frustration near the panic level, we got stuck behind that damn baht bus. A baht bus is a Japanese pickup truck that’s been rigged to carry passengers on bench seats facing each other in the back. There’s a metal canopy over the top and a set of steps where the tailgate is supposed to be. In Thailand, baht buses are used for everything from taxis to vegetable trucks. This one was painted red and white and it didn’t have anything in the back. It was in front of us, poking along on a narrow, bumpy, dirt road. The idiot driving the pile of junk refused to let me pass. If I slowed down, he 1

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did, too. Every time we got on a straight stretch he’d speed up, moving to the middle of the road. The car that Christy and I had rented was air conditioned, so we didn’t have to breathe the dust being tossed up from the bastard’s rear wheels. But I was getting tired of squinting through the windshield trying to see the road through clouds of red dirt. At one point I had to turn the wipers on to shove the crud off so I could see. Finally I slowed down almost to a stop, deciding I would rather get back to Chiang Mai a half hour late than pile us up in some ditch. The pickup slowly moved off ahead of us and I thought I had seen the last of him as the dust started to thin out. I kept the speed down so I wouldn’t catch up until we got back to paved highway. We never made it. I drove around a curve and there the son of a bitch was, parked at a forty-five-degree angle across the road. I hit the brakes, throwing Christy forward against the windshield. There wasn’t room on either side to get around him. **You okay?’’ I asked, checking Christy to make sure she didn’t have anything worse than a bump on the head. It took a couple of seconds to make sure while she rubbed her forehead and twisted her neck a bit in each direction. ‘‘T’m okay,”’ she finally answered. ‘‘What’s he doing parked across the road like that?’’ . ‘“‘That’s what ’'m going to find out,’’ I said as I opened the door. ‘‘Stay right here.”’ I was mad and paying all my attention to the baht

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bus, wondering what kind of cretin I would have to deal with, so Christy saw them first. ‘Morgan! Look out, they’ve got guns.”’ There were eight of them coming out of the trees on both sides of the road. They were dressed in dark green fatigues and held automatic assault rifles that looked bigger than the little men carrying them. What they lacked in physical size they made up for by looking mean. They surrounded our rented Toyota, waving their rifles and shouting. One of them spoke — English of a sort, at least enough to say things like, *“No talk! Raise hands!’’ To Christy, he said as he jerked the door open on her side, *‘Get out! Get out!”’ *“Hands on car top,’” was the next demonstration of his remarkable command of a foreign language. The man doing the talking was little, only about five foot five at most. He had one eye, the other covered with a dirty, white-cloth patch. He and all the others were wearing jungle-green fatigue uniforms that were soaked - with sweat and caked with dust.

When I was in the position, he jammed his gun barrel against the back of my neck while one of the others

patted me down, taking my wallet, my money clip, and the Buck knife I had in my pocket. Another of the clowns, a kid that looked only about sixteen, grabbed my left wrist and lifted it off the top of the car long enough to pull off my Seiko. Twice I tried to say something, first to the one-eyed bastard giving the orders, then to Christy, who was standing opposite me with her hands on top of the car.

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Each time I got a hard nudge from the rifle barrel and more of that ‘‘no talk, no talk’ shit. The terror on Christy’s face flashed into anger and frustration. The two pieces of shit patting her down were giving her more intimate attention than they had given me. The young kid on my side of the car cracked what must have been a joke, because they all started laughing. He was probably complaining about his bad luck in drawing me to search instead of the pretty round-eyed woman. The laughter got their attention long enough for me to © mouth in Christy’s direction, ‘‘Don’t worry, we’re just being robbed. They won’t hurt us if we cooperate.’’ Christy was back to being more frightened than angry, the hands patting her breasts and fanny suggesting she might be in for more than the loss of her watch and rings. I added, ‘‘They’ll let us go as soon as they get our valuables.”’ I wasn’t just whistling in the dark. The men stripping us of our wealth didn’t have insignia patches on their uniforms, but there was lettering stitched on the pockets in what looked like the Burmese alphabet. The bastards had to belong to one of the warlords who deal in guns and heroin along the Thai/Burmese border. For the last couple of years, the Thai army has done all it could to keep them on the Burmese side of the border, so I was surprised they even dared to be there. That’s why my immediate guess was they were deserters trying to build a stake before hightailing it away from the border area. The warlords all executed desert-

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ers, so I didn’t think our boys would want to hang around long enough to enjoy a bit of rape. They’d take the valuables and run for the jungle. Mark up one wrong decision for Morgan Adams. They didn’t let us go. Instead, they started shoving us toward the baht bus, while the linguist shouted, ‘‘Get in

bus! Get in bus!”’ Before I could really believe it was happening, we were both sitting in the back of the damn pickup surrounded by the nasty-looking midgets with big guns. The driver got the engine started after a couple of noisy tries, turned around, and headed back the way we had come. The fellow sitting opposite me was the one-eyed leader. I knew enough about guns to see that the safety on his AK-47 was off. Every time I started to open my mouth he’d shake the weapon. My ass was sucking air with worry that the wrong bump would squeeze his finger he had slipped inside the trigger guard. I tried to sit very still, hoping he would relax a bit and put the - finger in a safer place. Only sitting still was damn near impossible given the driving talents of our new chauffeur. Christy was on the other side of the truck bed, wedged in between two of our captors. Her sandy hair was whipping in the wind, picking up red dust as we went along. Her face was covered with terror. I tried to play the hero, giving her a wink and a couple of signals with the old body language that were supposed to reassure her. Continuing my fraud, I leaned back, riding with the bumps, staring at the frightening man in front of me, trying to act like a French tourist on

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a hill-tribe trek. I wondered if French tourists ever shit in their pants like I was trying not to do. We drove past the village where Christy and I had started out the day all set to spread happiness and good cheer. It had been filled with kids and little old ladies a half hour ago. Now the village was boarded up tight, as if the people had been told that a storm of trouble was on the way. We kept bouncing and jerking about for a couple more hours, the condition of the road deteriorating as we wound up through the mountains on ever-steeper inclines. We never went very fast. You can’t drive fast on those kinds of switchbacks. Once they had to unload us when we hit an incline so steep the little truck couldn’t pull it with all of us in the back. You can go just so far and so high on any road in Southeast Asia, and we eventually reached the end of that one. We pulled into a round clearing a little below a ridge line. A dozen people or so were standing there, Lahu hill tribesmen judging from the green, orange, and red colors the women were wearing. They were surrounded by sacks and bundles. Our captors hauled us out of the back with the same useful conversation we had been hearing along the way and headed us marching down a trail. As we left, the villagers started piling their belongings and themselves into the back of the baht bus. Nobody seemed surprised or curious about our miniature tour group. I didn’t think we could count on the baht bus driver to go running to a cop once he got down the mountain with his new load of humanity.

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It wasn’t a jungle trail we were on, at least not in the sense that most Americans think about jungles and Tarzan movies. Our captors weren’t using bolo knives to hack their way through, and we never saw a snake or a tiger. It was more like a remote area in West Virginia or the Smoky Mountains, if you can imagine a place in that part of the world where the leaves never turn and the temperature hits the eighties or nineties every day of the year. Christy and I could both take bigger steps than the little armed men leading us. We were in good physical shape and fairly well dressed for the occasion. Christy had on running shoes, faded jeans, and a loose yellow blouse that didn’t quite hide the outline of her nice tits. On level ground we would have done great at keeping up. But we kept winding down into ravines, then up over ridge lines, then back down again. I started to develop a psychotic hatred for walking downhill. It always meant we would have to climb back up another * one.

By the time we had been walking for a couple of hours, I was dragging, my clothes soaked with sweat, my lungs heaving, and my heart trying to beat a path out of my chest. Christy didn’t look any better. Every time_we would stumble or slow down we got punched, shoved, or threatened with one of the guns. Fortunately, while they wanted us to move faster, they didn’t seem ready to bayonet us beside the trail if we didn’t, or couldn’t. When they finally realized that the poking and shoving was doing more damage than good

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to the pace of our march, they stopped, let us catch our breath, and chattered between themselves a bit. They had kept us separated during the march, but they let us collapse on the ground next to each other. We spent the first few minutes just breathing. ‘I’m so tired I don’t care what they do to me,”’ Christy finally blurted out. After a few more deep breaths, she asked the question I’d been worrying about

along the way. ‘‘Morgan, why? What do they want?”’ ‘‘I can’t figure it out,’’ I answered. “‘It doesn’t make sense as a robbery.”’ ‘‘Are they going to hold us for ransom?’’ she asked, suggesting the next obvious conclusion. *‘That doesn’t track either. The insurgents operating on the other side of the border aren’t called opium warlords for nothing. They make too much money off dope to bother with kidnaping. Maybe it’s political, but it would be the first time they ever involved tourists in that kind of thing.”’ ‘““Were we unlucky?’’ she asked. ‘‘Or did they know who they wanted to kidnap?”’ I don’t know why she expected me to have all the answers, but if the talking would keep the terror away for a while, I was willing to join in. ‘‘That’s the idea that scares me the most. You’ve got to admit, we have pissed a few people off in the last week.”’ ‘*Yes, but I thought we had it all settled. How could anybody gain from kidnaping us now?”’ ‘‘Maybe it’s revenge,’’ I suggested. ‘‘You think Bumper Butz arranged this?’’

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‘“‘He knows we just destroyed his dreams of glory recovered. Only, he’s such a stupid schmuck, I can’t believe he’s capable of setting up this kind of operation, unless he was right here on the scene.”’ **You don’t think it’s that Wilai character?’ I looked at her, then shrugged. ‘‘If I thought Wilai had the brains of a small snake, I would know he did it. He is still my first suspect, even if it doesn’t make sense.’’ ‘‘Maybe Bumper was right,’’ Christy suggested. ‘‘Maybe it is our own government. Maybe we were getting into something the government didn’t want brought out.” ‘“‘T have a hard time believing that,’’ I answered, “‘even if the CIA are the only other people I can think of that might have the contacts to pull off something like this. But I bet when we get to the end of this march, we’ll find Wilai waiting to greet us, not somebody in an Ivy League sweater.’’ ‘‘Morgan,’’ she asked, “‘do you think they’re going

to kill us?”’ ‘‘T don’t think so, at least not for a while. If all they wanted to do was kill us and hide the bodies, there’s no reason for them to torture us by walking us up and down these damn mountains. We’re being taken someplace for some reason. They want us alive.”’ ‘*T know one reason why they want me alive,’’ she muttered as a wave of fear shook her body. I wish I could have said something brave to cheer her up. But she was right; she was in for a hard time, even if we did get out of it alive. I didn’t see any reason why

10 ROGER VICTOR I should tell her about the last time a tourist couple fell into the hands of one of the insurgent groups in the area. The man was a Mexican citizen, the wife a Belgian. The wife was eventually released, after a gang bang that lasted six days. The husband had been killed the first day when he tried to stop it. While we were talking, our captors finished their - own conversation. It ended in some kind of decision, because two of them left immediately, traveling down the trail in the same direction we had been going. As the two disappeared around the next bend, I saw they were moving at the usual pace for most of the hill-tribe populations. They call it walking. I'd call it a dead run. I decided they were anxious to get back to wherever it was they were taking us and let the boss know about their great success in capturing two dangerous roundeyes. Or maybe they wanted to make sure we got a proper reception when we finally arrived. The six fellows who were left let us rest a few minutes more, even passing around a couple of canteens so we each could take a drink. When we started walking again, they were a little more tolerant about our slow pace—not much, but a little. The trail was narrow, and sometimes the footing wasn’t all that good. We had to walk single file most of the time: two jungle soldiers in front, then Christy, then two more, then me, then the last two. They hadn’t bothered to tie our hands, which saved my life at least five times when I stumbled or slipped and almost went rolling down the mountainside. The heat must have been getting to me, because a while after the two men had left us, I got to thinking

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about how the odds had dropped a bit in our favor. Then I went totally delirious and started planning how ‘maybe I could slow up a bit, lengthen the gap between me and the men in front, and watch for an opportunity to take the two clowns behind me. After all, I reasoned in my fatigue-fogged mental process, I weighed as much as the two of them together, and they didn’t look all that bright. I am not really that stupid ordinarily, but I was getting a bit desperate about our prospects for survival. I had enough of a geographic fix on our position to know that we were pretty close to the border, if we hadn’t already crossed out of Thailand. In that part of the world, once you’re out of friendly Thailand, you’re into places where no American wants to be. It seemed the perfect opportunity. The trail was winding through some heavy brush. I had been faking a sore foot, and we had fallen far enough back that I couldn’t

see the man in front. The guy right behind me stopped to take a piss. The man behind him moved up to cover me and poked me a couple of times in the small of my back with the weapon he was carrying, a well-used M-16. Touching me like that meant he didn’t know what he was doing. I spun around, pushing the rifle out with my arm and grabbing hold of the barrel while I aimed a kick at his balls. It worked, it actually worked. My foot lifted the poor iittle shit a good six inches off the ground. The first thing he did was let go of the rifle. He came back down, riding my foot all the way to the dirt. Once

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there, he doubled up with both hands between his legs and started screaming. It took me a couple of seconds to get the rifle turned around and aimed in the direction of the other fellow. He stood there with his pants unbuttoned, holding his cock in his hand, probably wondering whether he was supposed to piss all over himself while he tried to get his weapon unslung or finish what he was doing first. Hot-diggity damn, I was saying to myself when the universe exploded. I don’t know what happened in the split second after that, but the next thing I remember is

the feel of my teeth plowing up the trail, filling my mouth with dirt. The son of a bitch up the line, the one with one eye, hadn’t been as far in front of me as I thought. He must have been running full tilt when he hit me on the back of my head with the butt of his rifle. P'll never know exactly how he got behind me so quickly, but after about a minuteof numb shock while I lay there trying to get the dirt out of my mouth and nose so I could breathe again, I got introduced to excruciating pain spreading from the point of impact right through my eyeballs. I wasn’t unconscious and | wasn’t dead, but I wished I was. Most of what I remember about the rest of the day is the pain, hammering through my head with every step; that and the taste of the dirt still in the nooks and crannies of my mouth. Half the time I couldn’t open my eyes, and when I did my vision was blurred. They dug a rope out from one of the small packs a couple of them were carrying and used one end to tie

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my hands together from behind. The guard in back of me, the one who was taking a piss when [| got fancy, held the other end, giving it a snap every time I started to stumble too far in either direction off the trail. Twice I slipped and slid down a mountainside, my fall suddenly halted when I reached the end of the rope, each

time the jerk threatening to separate my arms from the sockets. At one point they halted again to give Christy a chance to rest. This time they kept us separated. They let Christy sit down, but made me stand there with two of them pointing the rifles at me. I focused my eyes and counted our guards. There were only five. They had left the guy I kicked beside the trail, holding his balls in his hands. I wondered

if

they would send somebody back for him or just leave him there by himself until he healed. One of the men passed Christy his canteen. She took a big drink in a hurry. Then, bless her sweet heart, she looked in my direction and saw nobody had bothered to offer me any. She got up—it looked like painfully—and started in my direction, holding the canteen out. The one-eyed bastard jumped up and stood in front of her, waving his rifle. “‘No give! No give!”’ he shouted. ‘*Big man no get.”’ She stood there, clutching the canteen in her hand a minute.

‘‘Shoot me, you son of a bitch,’’ I heard her

say. ‘‘Shoot me or let me give him a drink!’’ It was just as senseless as my trying to fight them, but she got away with it. She brushed past him and kept coming, daring them to shoot her. I stood there, hoping they

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wouldn’t shoot her. I never wanted a drink of water so bad in my life. God bless the pretty lady, even if I couldn’t get enough of my act together to say thanks. All I was up to doing was to fall to my knees, lift my head, grab the neck of the canteen with my mouth, and guzzle, hoping I could drain it empty before they took it away. With my thirst lessened a bit, I went back to paying all my attention to my head, wondering if the pain would ever stop. It was long after dark when we walked into a village that was the target of our little trek. I don’t remember much about our arrival. I do know they split us up, marching Christy off in one direction while they threw me into a bamboo cage. The last thing they did before they locked the chain was untie my hands. The fatigue had reached the level where it started to cancel out the pain. I collapsed on the woven mat used as the floor of the cage and surprised myself by going to sleep. I honestly did worry about Christy as I blacked out. I hoped they realized that she was too tired to be any fun to fuck. Maybe they would let her have a good night’s sleep before the gang rape started. That, I bragged to myself, would give me some time to figure out an escape plan before she got too badly hurt. I would have started planning right then and there if I could have kept my eyes open. It didn’t take all that long for the sleep to suppress the fatigue down to a point where the pain could take over again. My pounding skull brought me back into the world of reality, and I sat up, looking around. It

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was still dark, but Venus hanging low in the sky told me it wouldn’t be long before dawn. As | got to my feet, I reached around and felt the egg on the back of my head. Nothing seemed to slide or move, so | could hope all I had was a minor concussion, not a fractured skull or something worse. I was still seeing double: two guards in front of the cage, four hands in front of my eyes, and lots and lots of bamboo bars. Once I got my eyes into focus, I found there was enough light from the coming dawn to get a good look at the surroundings. At first glance the place looked pretty much like any hill-tribe village in the Thai highlands, scattered dwellings of cheap lumber construction with thatched tops in most places but a sprinkling of corrugated tin roofs. There were pens for animals, and lots of dogs, pigs, and a few ponies sleeping outside the huts. On the second look around, I started to spot things _ suggesting a military camp more than a village. There was more order to the arrangement of the buildings than was the case in villages. Some of the buildings were big enough to be dormitories or mess halls and one looked like a headquarters building. It even had a small parade ground in front. Someplace off in the distance, I could hear the thump of a diesel motor, so at least some of the buildings probably had electricity. There were also the guards, only five or six of them, but all in the same fatigue uniform, all armed, and all patrolling. That is, all patrolling except for the one standing in front of my cage about ten feet away. He

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just stood there, staring at me, probably with orders to shoot as soon as I started chewing through the bamboo bars. The only things in the cage besides me were a large gourd in one corner and a bucket in another. I picked up the gourd and found it filled with water. I took a tentative taste. It wasn’t the best, but it was drinkable, and I was too thirsty to worry about the bugs it might be taking on a ride to my gut. That done, I used the bucket for its obvious purpose, then sat back down again. If I was going to do any good for myself or Christy, I was going to have to do something for the pain in my head. I sat down, leaned back against the bamboo bars, and concentrated on the spot at the back of my skull that was hurting so bad. It took a long time before I could get enough of those brain chemicals circulating in my blood to give me a hint of relief, but finally it started to work. As the pain got a bit more bearable, my mind started to wander. I thought back to a recent morning in Seattle, and the shriveled old man who had started Christy and me down the trail. I had been so sure it was going to be nothing but a well-paid snipe hunt. I was personally positive that there weren’t any Americans being held prisoner in cages someplace in Southeast Asia. I was wrong. There’s at least one American in a cage in Southeast Asia. Me!

Joseph Josephus Auerbauch. That’s all that was written on the door in solid-gold block letters. Anybody who got through the security systems and up to the twenty-sixth floor of the Consolidated International Building didn’t have to be told what Auerbauch’s

_ job in the company was. The executive who led me from the security counter at the building entrance to the holy of holies on the top floor turned me over to the middle-aged secretary at the desk in front of Auerbauch’s door. She told me to go right in, and I did.

The office was exactly what I had expected—iarge, full banks of windows on two sides, expensive darkbrown carpet, lots of empty space punctuated by modern office furniture, and the boss sitting behind a desk not quite big enough for a tennis court. 17

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I always picture industrial giants as just that, men tall in stature. Auerbauch liked to hire those kind of people. I had passed a dozen men over six feet tall on the way up, every one of them dressed exactly like my guide— dark-blue wool suit, white shirt, narrow striped tie, a clean-shaven face that looked like it had been put on, just like the shirt, and a styled haircut without a trace of sideburns. J. J. Auerbauch was wearing the uniform. His suit looked tailor-made by a London tailor, not Hong Kong. He would have had to climb a stepladder to look me or the men who worked for him in the eye. The black

leather executive chair he was sitting on made him look even smaller. Sparse gray hair and aged, wrinkled skin added to the impression of diminutive size. The only thing that wasn’t small about the man was the Roman nose that held a half-frame pair of reading glasses on his face. He’s got to be at least eighty years old, I thought as I stood there waiting for him to look up. He had to have known I was in the room, but he kept reading the file on the desk in front of him. He still hadn’t looked up. He was playing one of those power games, showing me his time was more important than mine. Auerbauch’s representative in Bangkok had given me

a $1,000 check and a first-class airline ticket to fly halfway around the world for the meeting. I was there. I had filled my part of the bargain. If Auerbauch didn’t want to take advantage of it, then

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fuck him, I had better things to do. I turned around and started back toward the door. There wasn’t anything small about his voice. It boomed out with the command quality one expected to find in an infantry major. ‘“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”’ I told him why I was going, but that it was none of his damn business where. “Don’t be so goddamned impatient,’’ he shouted. ‘*‘A thousand dollars ought to give me at least twenty minutes, not two. Come back and sit down.”’ I had made my point. Play time was over. I walked back and sat down in one of the two chairs sitting in front of his desk. He reached over and spoke into a box on the desk. “*Tell Hammond to get in here.”’ That was the first time I saw Christy as she walked through a door at the end of the office and across the room. She looked at the old man, got his nod, and sat down ~ in the second chair. She was tall, around five foot ten,

and on the short side of her mid-thirties. Her sandycolored hair was tied up in a businesslike bun, and the blue suit with a skirt, not pants, came right out of an instruction book for junior lady executives. Her legs looked good. She kept them clasped together with her feet flat on the floor in front of her. The clothes didn’t

quite hide a shape filled out in all the right places. Her face was more striking than pretty—high cheekbones and a well-defined classical nose. ‘*This is Morgan Adams,”’ the old man announced,

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nodding in my direction, ‘‘the man you seemed to think | is so well qualified for what I need.’’ His comment sounded more like a sneer than a statement. _ ‘‘Mr. Adams comes highly recommended,’’ she answered, looking me over with a smug little grin on her face. Then she added, “‘Despite his insistence on a rather casual appearance.”’ “You mean he looks like a fucking hippy,’’ Auerbauch said. “‘I’ve discovered he’s also temperamental.”’ I decided I wanted to get involved in the conversation. “‘I don’t remember filling out any job applications for this company. What do you say we stop the discussion of my shady character and get on with why I’m sitting here instead of my favorite bar in Pattaya.”’ The old man got down to business. ‘‘I need the kind of help you have a reputation for providing. If you’re successful in resolving the problem, it will be worth a lot of money, as much as $50,000 for a few days’ work.”’ That got my attention. Not that I had to have it. But nobody ever has quite enough. So I kept listening. The old man went back to looking at the file in front of him, scratching through the pages, apparently trying to figure out where to begin. ‘‘T had a grandson,’’ he finally stated. ‘‘Then I lost him. Only now I’m being told he’s still alive.”’ I got a bad feeling three inches to the left of my appendix that I knew what was coming next. ‘‘My grandson was in the air force,’’ Auerbauch went on. *‘He was stationed at an air base in Thailand. He got shot down over Laos in 1972. I gave him up for 9°

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dead a long time ago. Only now there is some new evidence that he’s still alive in some Communist prison camp.’’ I didn’t know whether to be angry or feel sorry for the old fart. The fifty big ones had just jumped out the window. I had flown 10,000 miles to turn down an invitation to a snipe hunt. I guess I felt more sorry than angry because I got very polite as I started to interrupt. ‘“‘Mr. Auerbauch,’’ I said, ‘‘1972 was thirteen years ago. I’ve spent most of those years in that part of the world. Even if your grandson did survive the crash, even if he was captured, even if he was held back when they released the prisoners in 1973, there’s no way he could have survived all those years in a jungle prison camp. Believe me, there aren’t any Americans being held in prison camps out there.”’ Before he could answer, a horrible thought jumped up. “‘My God,’’ I said, ‘‘I hope you weren’t going to try and get me to organize some kind of rescue attempt.”’ ‘*You can bet your ass I never considered that,’’ the ' man snorted. ‘‘If I want to finance a military operation to rescue my grandson, I won’t pick a fucking professional civilian to organize it. I’ve already got the man who can run that kind of operation.”’ Now I was really curious about what I was doing there. Auerbauch continued with his explanation. ‘‘A retired Special Forces Major, Bumper Butz, came to see me a week ago. He disagrees with you. He’s convinced there are still MIAs being held prisoner in Laos. He wants to mount a private rescue operation. He claims he

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has agents that have located the camp. He wants me to finance it. He wants at least $3 million to do it.”’ I sat there, waiting for him to continue, wondering if I should tell him that he was being taken. The old man’s eyesight must have been okay, because he could read my face. “‘T know,”’ he continued, ‘‘I didn’t get rich believing every tale told me. I’ve thrown a half-dozen clowns out over the years trying to sell me the same idea. Only Bumper came up with something new.”’ Auerbauch opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out a small box. He shoved it across the top in my direction. “‘Butz claims his agent brought these things out of Laos three weeks ago,’’ Auerbauch explained. ‘*Supposedly, they came out of the safe in the commandant’s office in the camp where my grandson is being

held. I had to pay Butz $10,000 for these things. He claims that’s what it cost him in payments to his agents.”’ The desk was so big I had to stand up and reach over to get the box. Inside, I found a wallet, a military I.D. card, two credit cards

with

1972 expiration dates,

a

California driver’s license issued in 1968, a set of dog tags, and an academy ring. There also was a walletsize picture showing a very pretty Oriental girl standing beside a man in a U.S. Air Force uniform. The man, except for a rather big nose, had Oriental features. The name on the dog tag and the cards was Abraham Auerbauch. Auerbauch answered the new question on my face. ‘““My youngest son was a rebel,’’ he explained. ‘‘He married a chink girl he met at Berkeley. I never tried to

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hide my prejudices. We kicked him out and we went a hell of a long time before we ever let him and his slanty-eyed wife back into our home. Only she did something neither of the wives of my other boys could do; she produced a healthy son. When I knew that he was going to be my only grandson, I tried to make it up after he grew up. I offered him a job in the company. He said he preferred the air force to being the old man’s China boy.” Auerbauch sat there a minute, trying to seal with a painful memory, looking even older than he was. Then he rallied, a rising anger covering the personal load of guilt he carried around. *‘Whatever problems we had between us, I'll be damned if I'll let a bunch of fucking Communists keep him as a pet.”’ “‘If that’s what’s happening,’’ I interrupted. ‘‘Why do you think these things prove he’s still alive?’’ ‘‘Butz says his agent got them from a camp guard - who sees my grandson every day. Butz says that the prisoners are being kept in northwest Laos not too far from the Thai border on some kind of prison farm. They’re fed well, but worked hard. The commies want them in good physical shape when the time comes to bring them

forward.”’ I couldn’t think of a single situation in which any Communist government could hope to gain political advantage by suddenly producing prisoners they had been holding for so many years, unless they wanted to get the American public mad enough to start World War

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III. Still, I resisted the strong urge to argue with the old fool. I did ask, ‘‘You keep saying ‘Butz says,’ like you don’t believe the story?’’ ‘*You’re smarter behind that beard than you look,”’ he answered. ‘‘Bumper Butz tells a good story. He’s spent a lot of time out there and he claims to speak Thai like a native. But all that’s been proved is that someone found the personal effects Abe had with him on his last mission. There is no evidence that proves he’s still alive. I want an independent evaluation of Butz, his sources of information, and what he’s doing out there before I finance a private. war.”’ *“What about the government?’’ I asked. ‘“‘Have you checked this all out with the State Department or the Pentagon?”’ ‘*You worked for the government all those years,”’ he came back. ‘‘Do you trust the bastards?”’ I didn’t bother to answer.

Instead I asked, “‘If you

want an independent evaluation, why not send your own people out there, like Landgrebe, the fellow who passed me the message and the ticket?’’ “‘T didn’t hire that fool for his initiative. He follows orders, which is exactly what I want from somebody running a foreign branch.”’ ‘*What makes you think I’m so great?’’ I asked. “ve heard about the treasure-hunting kid in the Vietnamese jail you helped spring, the labor problem in Manila you worked out, and a couple of other things like that. Frankly,’’ he continued, ‘‘I think you’re a lazy, immoral, no-good bastard who’s trying to tell the

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world to fuck off. But my colleagues tell me that you’ve got a strange set of personal ethics that I won’t pretend to understand. I’m told you’ve got the best private contacts in Asia, that you’re discreet, that when you do accept a job, you’ll do your damndest or you won’t show up for your paycheck.”’ **So what are you offering for my services?’’ I asked. “‘All your expenses and 8,000 bucks for two weeks’ time. You get that even if you draw a complete blank. If you come up with evidence that convinces me this is a fraud, I'll make that $16,000. The same if you find any proof that supports Bumper’s claims.”’ **What about that $50,000 you mentioned?’’ I asked. ‘‘My grandson’s been missing for thirteen years. I want to know for sure whether he’s dead or alive. You or anyone else that comes up with proof—and I mean proof that convinces me one way or the other—will collect that reward.”’ ‘‘What happens if Bumper’s right, if your grandson’s - alive in a Lao prison camp.”’ ‘*You prove it, you get the $50,000. And Bumper gets all the financing he needs for his private rescue mission.” I immediately wrote off any possibility of making _ fifty thou on the deal, even if I could find some kind of sensible explanation for the appearance of Abe Auerbauch’s personal effects after all these years. Frankly, I didn’t like the proposal. The whole MIA issue was a sack of war ashes that had been spread by too many people riding political horses. It wasn’t the kind of job I

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liked to take. The vultures were picking over the bones,

and I’d rather fly with eagles. Another thing, I want to like the people I help out, and I didn’t like the shriveled little shit that was dangling a carrot in front of me. I got the feeling he never had cared much for his grandson, but he didn’t take to the idea that somebody else might have something he thought belonged to him. I would have turned him down flat if it hadn’t been for the woman with the sandy-colored hair sitting in the other chair. I am not one of those men who mentally screws every woman he meets or talks to. Little girls, cripples, women a lot older than me, the hopelessly fat, jailbait, and obvious dykes never get considered. The rest do. It had been a long time since I had bedded a round-eyed woman, and the woman sitting there fit the type that gets a lot more than just consideration. I decided to play along for a while longer for the chance it might provide for suggesting dinner once we had finished with the old man. ‘I’m still not sure it’s the kind of thing I want to get involved in,’’ I said, ‘‘and I would want to look at a contract before I made a final decision. If I take it, how do you want me to handle progress reports? Do you want me to report to you directly, or your office in Bangkok?”’ ‘‘Neither,’’ he answered. “‘I’m going to put someone on the ground out there I can trust. I'll want you to report to her on a daily basis.”’ Eteny ‘*That’s right,’’ he said. “‘I want Miss Hammond on

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the same plane back to Bangkok. She’s not my first choice for this kind of job, but she’ll have to do. You’ll deal directly with her on any problems you have from getting airline tickets to letting me know the results. She’ll handle all the communications back to me.”’ The possibility of a date for the evening was one _ thing, but I had no interest in a partner, even one with sandy-colored hair and green eyes. **Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘‘You obviously don’t un-

derstand the way I work. I don’t work under supervision; I don’t want people interfering before the job gets done. You either trust me to do it my way, or you find somebody else.”’ ‘*‘Don’t dangle your balls in front of me,’’ he shouted back. ‘I’m not sending her out to supervise you, and she had better damned well not interfere with whatever it is you do. I want you to keep her informed of what you find, but that’s all. If you can’t come up with information that says I shouldn’t, I’m going to go with _ Butz. He’s already back in Thailand, and he claims he’s ready to go as soon as he has the money. Miss Hammond will be there to make the financial arrangements to transfer the money if you can’t prove Butz’s a fraud. I want her there because I don’t want the people in my Bangkok office to have anything to do with it.”’ He had come to his feet while he was saying all that. With the fire in him, he didn’t look nearly as old as he was supposed to be. He stood there a minute, staring at me. Almost as an afterthought, he added as he sat back down, ‘‘That’s your deal. Take it or leave it.”’ I should have said forget it and walked out. Instead I

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got smart, thinking it would be more fun to make him change his mind and order me out. So I stood up, walked to the edge of the desk, put both hands down, leaned over, looked him in the eye, and told him. ‘‘Send over your contract, you little bastard. I’ll take

the job.” His face got red, only he didn’t start to shout like I expected. He started to laugh. It started out as a snicker, then rolled into a bellywhanger. Miss Hammond jumped up, moving around the desk, anxious that maybe the old man was hurting himself with the exertion. He saw her concern and got it under control, bringing the noise back down to a giggle. Before he could completely control himself, he blurted out, “‘I get called a bastard damn near every day. But that’s the first time in fifty years anybody’s had the guts to call me Jittle. Christine, put this son of a bitch in a company car and send him back to his hotel. Make sure my personal lawyers get a contract over there before the end of the day.”’ Then he pushed the file in front of him after the box that was sitting on my side of the desk. ‘‘Here,’’ he said. ““The file has everything we know about my grandson, Major Butz, and the whole situation. Take it and those personal effects. You might be able to use them out there.”’ For a moment there, I thought Miss Hammond was going to reach out and grab the folder before I could pick it up. She caught herself and blushed a bit. It looked like she hadn’t expected me to get my hands on

whatever was in there.

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Acting the perfect junior executive, she led me out of the office and down the corridor to the elevator while I tried to figure out how I was being conned into taking a job I didn’t want under conditions I should have never accepted. Inside the elevator, the Hammond woman pressed the button for the basement. As the car started down, she looked in my direction with a twisted little smile on her lips. It was the first time she had said anything directly to me. ‘‘You must have gotten to him. That’s the only time he’s ever used my first name.” She said it in the same tone a college professor would use to toss out some historical tidbit to a class. It was meant to inform but not to encourage friendship. I was getting the feeling that Miss Hammond didn’t approve of me, and that she wasn’t any happier than I was with her proposed trip to Bangkok. It looked like this was not the beginning of the kind of friendship I liked to have with bright, attractive women.

As we stepped out of the elevator, I thought of something else. ‘‘If he was going to send you to Bangkok anyway, how come he made me come all the way to Seattle? You could have made the offer after you got out there.”’ ‘*Mr. Auerbauch always makes the final decision on - who goes to work for him on things that matter.’’ After a bit of a pause she added, ‘‘Frankly, you’re lucky he’s that way. If he had given me the decision, I would have never hired you.”’ With that little remark, she put me into a limo and

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told me the contract would be at my hotel room before close of business.

They had put me up in one of those Holiday Inns the advertisements promise will have no surprises and be close to where you want to be. There was no place within a thousand miles I wanted to be right then. It was a little after 11:00 A.M., but jet lag always screws up my stomach, and I was hungry. I checked out the hotel coffee shop and found the food typical—that’s spelled tasteless. They did have Heineken on the menu, so at least I didn’t have to wash lunch down with the light alcoholic Kool-Aid our native industry palms off as beer. I must admit, though, I do love American hotels, even the chains. The water’s always hot; the sheets are clean; you can drink right out of the tap; and there are those marvelous ice machines. Back in the room, I fixed a Scotch and soda, using the bottle in my bag and a can from a coin eater by the icemaker. I took a hot shower, then turned on the boob tube, wondering if programming had gotten any better since my last visit Stateside and marveling at the twenty channels from which to choose. It took me ten minutes of sucking on the drink while switching through the channels to conclude that we expatriates weren’t missing a thing as far as daytime TV was concerned. I turned the tube off and lay back on the bed, the drink on the stand beside me. At first, I thought the alarm clock by my bed in Pattaya was ringing and I went pawing around, wonder-

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ing why it wasn’t in its usual place. Then I realized I wasn't on the beach and it wasn’t my trusty wake-up pal; it was the phone. It took me a couple of tries to get it off the hook and up to my ear. It was the Hammond woman, calling from the lobby, telling me she had the contract for me to sign. I told her to bring it up to my room. She said it might be better to meet in the lobby. I suggested she go back to the office and find someone who wasn’t frightened to meet a man alone in a hotel room and send that person to do the job. Three minutes later, an angry, red-faced lady was handing me the contract. She looked around at the half-finished drink, the tossed covers, and the wrinkled

me, the puritan in her look condemning anyone capable of getting high while the sun was up. It might be shining in Seattle, but it was past midnight on my time. I motioned her to a chair, got an expected refusal for an offer of a drink, picked up my own, then sat down on the second chair and read the

- contract. When I first started doing my special little jobs, I discovered a technique that saves me lots of money in legal fees. I read a contract very carefully with a felt-tip pen in my hand. Every time I can’t understand a sentence because of the legal jargon, I very carefully cross - it out. The parts that give something to me are always easy to understand. It’s the other parts that have all the fancy language. By the time I got around to signing the contract, I had lined out a fourth of the document. I got up and handed the copies back.

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‘*Get the old man’s signatures on this and we have a deal.’’ She stood there, horror spreading across her face, as she looked through the documents that I had so thoroughly soiled with my green marking pen. ‘‘Mr. Adams,’’ she gasped. *‘This contract was drawn up by our best legal minds. You’ve destroyed it.”’ ‘‘Fine,’’ I said. “‘If they want to write another one, they’re welcome to try. Tell them to write everything in English this time. Either that or tell the old man to sign this one. The only things I lined out are all the clauses that say why I might not get the money.”’ ‘‘Mr. Adams,’’ she argued, ‘‘there’s no way Mr. Auerbauch can sign this contract.”’ As far as I was concerned, that was good news. ‘‘Tell the old man it was nice talking to him,’’ I answered. She gave an unladylike grunt that wrote me off as a hopeless case who was probably best dropped anyway. She shoved the papers into the proper little briefcase she carried and started for the door. I was tempted to ask her if she would like to go to dinner, but decided I would only make her madder. I couldn’t shake the jet lag, so I ended up eating in the hotel restaurant. I went to bed early, but was wide awake at 2:30 A.M., wishing I knew somebody in Seattle other than Christine Hammond and her aged employer.

She called at 8:00 A.M. sharp. Her voice didn’t sound

all that happy. ‘“Mr.

Adams,’’

she started,

‘‘Mr.

Auerbauch

has

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signed the contract.’’ She hesitated, then added, ‘‘Against both my advice and the advice of our legal department.”’ I was getting a bit fonder of the old fellow. ‘‘I guess I’m hired,’’ I told her, wondering again why I was doing it. I asked, ‘‘Are you still part of the deal?”’ *‘Mr. Adams,”’ she almost shouted, ‘‘I am not part of the deal. I am a business associate who will be accompanying you back to Thailand. Please don’t forget that.”’ That’s all 1 need, I thought, a libber who thinks the whole world is trying to break into her pants. Not that the idea of talking my way there hadn’t crossed my mind, but it looked like this would be a long, dry, and chaste professional relationship. I tossed out a few soothing words and asked if she wanted me to make the reservations. ‘“‘T already have us booked on a Northwest flight leaving at 1:40 P.M. I'll pick’ you up at noon. We change _ planes in Tokyo and then stay overnight in Hong Kong at Northwest’s expense.’”’ Typical, I thought, travel with the American airline, even if there’s a Thai International flight that goes the same way with no change of planes. I came close to telling her to shove it. If we were in such _ a hurry, we should have taken the Thai flight. If we weren't, then I had been counting on a couple of extra days in the States. I decided the hell with it. Let experience be her teacher. I might as well get back while my inside clock was still on Bangkok time. I

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scratched the idea of getting down to San Diego to see my kids and settled for a couple of quick phone calls. I told Miss Hammond I’d be waiting when the company limo arrived.

We arrived at the airport with her dressed for success—a light-green business outfit that looked tailor-made, and

her hair done in a bun. She was carrying a small briefcase designed to compromise with a lady’s purse. _ Me, as usual, I was dressed for slob—personally faded Levi's, well-used Nikes, and a blue-denim safari shirt—I love all those pockets when I’m traveling. I grabbed both our bags from the back of the company car that had deposited us in front of the Northwest terminal area and started for the first-class check-in counter, expecting her to trail behind. ‘‘Mr. Adams,’

she hollered at me.

‘‘Please let me

have my bag. I have to check in over there.’’ She motioned in the direction of a mob of at least eighty people. ‘*You mean you’ve got a cheapo ticket?’’ I asked. 35

36

ROGER VICTOR ‘‘Mr. Adams,’’ she said, her voice taking the tone of

the average Sunday-school teacher, ‘‘Consolidated had to give you a first-class ticket to get you here. I’m a company employee. I travel economy.” She said it like that was her choice, not a company rule, with a hint thrown in that my ticket was a waste of Consolidated’s money. Screw her, she could ride with the mob; I wasn’t going to. When I left government service for good, I swore I’d never ride in the back of the plane again. If she liked that kind of self-abuse, more power to her. I’d probably have more fun riding by myself in first class anyway. I might get lucky with a stewardess. I never have before, but there’s got to be a first time. Having her back with the common travelers would give me a problem, though. I wanted to use the time on the plane to go over the file that Auerbauch had given me. Christine Hammond was the one who had put it together, and if I needed to ask some questions, I didn’t want to go searching through humanity on vacation to find her. It would be better if we sat together, but my dedication to the job didn’t include volunteering to ride the aviation industry’s answer to the cattle boat. ‘““Give me your ticket,’’ I said, putting our bags down and holding out my hand, ‘‘and wait right here.”’ Reluctantly, she did so, making a couple of comments to suggest that I was about to do something that was illegal, immoral, or would invalidate our reservations. All I did was find a Northwest customer-service agent and spend about ten minutes bargaining. First I asked if we could switch the two tickets, one economy and one

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first-class, for a pair of business-class tickets. That’s almost as good as first-class. He told me that business class was full on that flight. I said fine and asked him to endorse both our tickets over to Thai International. He hemmed and hawed a minute, grabbed Christy’s ticket, talked on the phone, and handed it back. *“We’ve upgraded Miss Hammond to first-class. Is that satisfactory?”’ That’s what I love about living in the Orient. If you survive, you learn you can bargain for anything. By the time we had got settled in our seats, my pretty traveling companion had called me Mr. Adams four different times. **Look,’’ I said, “‘you might as well drop the mister bit and call me Morgan, because I’m going to start calling you Christine, whether you like it or not.”’ ‘Please don’t,’’ she said. ‘‘Nobody ever calls me that. Except, I guess, Mr. Auerbauch,’’ she added with half a giggle, the first crack I had seen in that thick professional facade. Then it cracked a bit more. ‘*Call me Christy. That’s what my friends do.”’ Well, I thought as the plane started down the runway, maybe there’s a bit of hope after all. After a couple of free drinks and a reasonably good meal, I pulled out the folder that Auerbauch had given me. We had ten hours of flying ahead of us, so I didn’t follow my usual practice of skimming first, then going back -to read for details. I took the file on like a book,

reading it a page at a time. It started with a summary of Abe Auerbauch’s mili-

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tary record and a report about his last mission. He had been hit over North Vietnam and was trying to baby his F-4 back to Thakli, the base just north of Bangkok from

which he had flown. He tried to tie up with a C-130 tanker over Laos, and discovered the hit had damaged

the fuel intake. Two minutes later he ran out of JP-4 and ejected. He never made radio contact; that was the last anybody had seen of him. Major Bumper Butz’s military history was there, too. Butz spent two tours in Vietnam and one as an advisor in. Thailand. He went through six months in the Defense Department’s language school at Monterey, California, before the Thai tour. He had won the Silver and the Bronze Star with two clusters along the way. His rate of promotion didn’t reflect his combat record, so he must

have had trouble with somebody. After he left the army, he tried to get into the international mercenary crowd, but never made a connection. Six months ago, he had shown up in Thailand, climbing on the MIA wagon with claims of contacts that were going into Laos. The file had an outline of the proposed raid he wanted to make and the budget he was requesting from Auerbauch. He had identified two other airmen who were supposed to be held in the same camp as young Auerbauch. He had also passed personal effects on to the families of those two men. Neither one of the families had any real money and both had separately appealed to Auerbauch to support Butz’s plan. The file had half a page of information on the man who was supposed to have seen the camp in Laos, a

oee ) Cnt

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Thai national named Wilai Phaksabai. Wilai claimed to be trading in contraband across the border, taking in soap, sandals, cloth, and canned foods in exchange for whatever gold Lao citizens still had in their possession. It was on one of those trading trips that Wilai reported he had stumbled on the existence of the prisoner-of-war camp. The name Wilai rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember why. In all those years that I have lived in Thailand, I’ve met a lot of people. I didn’t know any smugglers, but I could have met him when he was doing something

else. Well, I thought as I went back to the file, maybe itll come to me later. Butz’s proposed plan lacked every important detail I would have wanted to know before putting any of my own money or effort into it. There were no maps and no independent verifications of the information he was getting from Wilai. There was no suggestion of how Butz expected to move mercenaries and large amounts of war materials into Thailand and up to the border without getting into a great deal of trouble with the Thai government. Bumper was one more of a list of ex-military types who had tried to mount rescue operations into Laos of one kind or another. The file had pretty complete information on them all, including one fellow, Bo Gritz, who actually did get into Laos. Bo later delivered what he claimed were the remains of some missing Americans to the American embassy in Bangkok. The U.S. government took possession and later reported that the remains tested out as animal bones, except for a couple

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of human bones identified as being of Mongolian racial origin. The Thai government, which doesn’t appreciate foreigners launching military attacks against neighboring countries, arrested Gritz, convicted him of a variety of crimes against Thai sovereignty, and deported him, making it clear if he ever came back he would serve the prison sentences that had been so graciously suspended. The file listed dozens of other reports of claimed sightings of U.S. prisoners by people who later came out as refugees. Miss Hammond’s notes described such reports as being of questionable validity and suggested the conclusion that there was no verifiable evidence proving that prisoners were still being held by any Communist government in Southeast Asia. As I read through the file, I'd ask Christy a question from time to time, always getting a detailed response. She knew the material and she’d exercised good judgment in putting it together. It was the kind of file that would let a man like Auerbauch make the right decision without having to know everything himself. What was funny about her responses was that the further I read into the file, the more nervous she seemed to be getting. I got to the last few pages and understood why. That last part of the file was mine. It was all there in the same detail—a description of me and my life, in-

cluding a summary of my abbreviated career in the Foreign Service with a list of postings, dates of promotions, that kind of thing. There was a Dunn and Bradstreet report on the company in Phoenix that my brother

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and I had inherited from our old man. There was an extended description of my lifestyle and my reputation since I had taken up pleasure and good living as my major occupations. There were also reports on several jobs that I had handled over the last two years with so much detail that I got a bit upset over how little discretion a couple of satisfied clients had used in talking about my successes on their behalf. My part of the file was factual, but it wasn’t complimentary. It was like it had been put together by someone who had talked to all the people I had pissed off at one time or another. There were a lot of those little adverbs and adjectives one can throw in that suggest something sinister, such as, “‘For unexplained reasons, he suddenly resigned from the Foreign Service.”’ Most people would have gotten pissed off, reading a file like that. I got a bit of a kick out of it. All the negative comments focused on my attitudes, my personal life, my irreverence, my dedication to wine and ‘women

(I can’t sing a song for shit).

I like myself. I can’t help it if a lot of other people don’t. But they all—even the people who hated me— only had good things to say about the work I had done. It goes to show, if you’re going to be eccentric, you had better be competent. Sitting beside me, Christy was getting more and more fidgety as I read those last few pages. Finally, she blurted out, ‘‘You were not supposed to see that part of the report. Mr. Auerbauch must have forgotten it was there.”’

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Auerbauch knew exactly where those pages were when he handed me the file. ‘‘Christy,”’ I said, ‘‘the way information gets passed around these days, there are pretty good chances that anything you write about somebody is going to be read by him sooner or later. Frankly, I like it that way.”’ I asked the next question with a little smile. ‘‘Tell me, if you had known I was going to get to read this, would you have written the same thing you did, or would you have lied to your boss?’’ That got to her and kept her quiet for a while. Her attitude was typical. Everybody loves to gossip, and it’s even better if you get paid for it. But nobody wants to be honest with the people they gossip about. That takes all the fun out. It’s easy to talk about the other guy, to screw up his chances of promotion, make sure he doesn’t get a security clearance, fuck up his life in a dozen different ways, as long as you can do it with no risk that he’l] know who did the dirt. She sat mulling it over a bit, then made up her mind. I was being frank, so she would be, too. “‘I might have softened it a bit in a couple of places,’’ she started, “*but I wouldn’t have lied. Even if I'd known you were going to see it, I would have had to put it all there.”’ She didn’t know it, but she had just made a couple of points with me. When I didn’t say anything or try to defend myself, she added, ‘‘I can’t understand why you threw it away, why you choose to be a bum most of the time instead of trying to contribute something to the world.”’ ‘“You mean I owe my talents to humanity; that I’m a

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failure if I don’t use them the way society wants instead of the way I want?’’ ‘*That’s exactly what I mean,’’ she answered. Then after a short silence, she added, ‘‘I tried to get into the Foreign Service. I took the written exam three different times. Each time I missed it by two or three points. Now I find somebody who had what I wanted and you junked it. Can you blame me for not understanding?’’ **T suppose not,’’ I answered. ‘‘I used to think it was pretty important, too. Only somewhere along the line I found out that all us government people out to set the world right were part of the problem, not the solution. I decided it was time to stop meddling in the lives of others and start living my own.”’ ’

‘*Okay,’’

she conceded,

“‘maybe

government

isn’t

the answer. So why did you turn your back on your family and the business your father left to you and your brother?”’ ‘‘Dear old dad,’’ I sighed. ‘‘He always hoped his _ prodigal son would come home once I got the Foreign Service out of my system. He wrote a will designed to enforce his dream, making me an equal partner with my brother, who had spent all that time working in the company while I traveled around the world. Dad played a dirty trick on poor Tom.”’ , ‘‘What do you mean?’’ she asked. ‘‘My research says you were the one who lost out on the deal.”’ ‘*Tom didn’t want me as a partner any more than I wanted in the business. He and his lawyers worked out a way that would nullify what my father tried to do with his will. They thought they were being very clever

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about it all, taking advantage of someone who didn’t have any business sense. My brother still thinks he got the best of me.”’ ‘“You mean, you don’t think he did?”’ ‘Of course not. I got what I wanted. We spent days in negotiations and he spent thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees figuring out little schemes that I understood a lot better than he ever knew.”’ ‘‘But he ended up with the whole company, and you got only a small settlement. Now the company is three times as big as when he started.”’ ‘‘He has become a rich man,’’ I conceded. ‘‘He works a minimum of fourteen hours a day. Even when he thinks he’s playing, he’s doing business, either on the golf course or taking guests to his country club. He’s got high blood pressure, a wife he hates but can’t afford to divorce, and a kid on drugs. But it wasn’t just the initial settlement I got. Your research missed the important part.”’ **What was that?”’ ‘“Every time he makes a dollar, I get twenty cents. He doesn’t enjoy a dime of the money he makes; I enjoy every penny of what he has to give to me. The funny thing is he has terrible guilt feelings because he thinks he cheated me.”’ : “If you're so opposed to working, why do you keep taking these funny little jobs solving problems for businessmen in places like Thailand and Manila?’’ “‘T didn’t say I didn’t approve of work; I’m just saying that work has no intrinsic value, unless you’re hungry, or it’s fun.”’

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The modern American woman doesn’t like that kind of talk. All those years that men kept them out of the Kiva, they convinced themselves that whatever the men were doing down there must be terribly important. They couldn’t imagine that when men hid from women they were playing silly little games using big-boy language to make them sound important. They weren’t really making it rain, or feeding people, or saving the world, or even saving souls. The Pueble Indians still don’t let them into the Kivas, but the ladies have gotten into just about everything else these days. I’m all for it when it makes it possible for a woman to get paid a fair wage for doing the same job as well as a man. And I like having them around helping you do a job. With a lot of women working beside you, you have that many more chances to meet one who might want to go to bed with you. It’s too damn bad, though, when women make the same mistake that men have been making by trying to find meaning in an activity that is supposed to do nothing but put the beans on the table. I was all set to make those arguments next, but Christy decided to withdraw from the conversation. She made a production of pulling the shade on the porthole down, adjusting a pillow, pushing the seat back, and popping up the footrest. She even put on the cute little eye mask the airlines pass out on transpacific flights. I put on the earphones, dialed the country-and-western music channel, and leaned back at a bit of an angle so I

- could take advantage of the blindfold over her eyes to make a careful study my new partner’s figure. As she

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twisted in her search for sleep, her skirt worked up a bit, giving me a nice view of her legs. I wondered what her hair would look like hanging loose. The size of the bun suggested it would fall below her shoulders. Next I found myself wondering if her skirt was hiding the same sandy-colored curls up between her legs. It would be worth the trip finding that out. I had to admit to myself that I wanted to fuck her silly. Based on our most recent conversation, I decided there wasn’t much chance of that happening. We spent about an hour in Narita, hardly time to buy a couple of things in the duty-free shop. Then we were on to Hong Kong, arriving there about 10:00 P.M. That gave us just enough time for an exhausted night’s sleep in our separate hotel rooms before boarding a Cathay Pacific flight at 9:20 A.M. for the final leg on to Bangkok. When we talked along the way, I decided to keep the conversation off me, focusing instead on her. I found she had been married for about four years and divorced another three. They had no children—‘‘his choice, not mine.’’ After the destruction of the marriage, she went back to school and got an MBA from Northwestern. We started our trip in Seattle in the afternoon on Friday. We arrived in Bangkok at 11:00 A.M. on Sunday morning, having crossed the dateline along the way. Anybody who thinks that getting there is half the fun of international travel in the jet age hasn’t done very much of it. We were numb with exhaustion as we moved with the crowd through immigration and customs at Don

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Muang Airport. We walked out of the terminal and got hit with the heat of Bangkok, just like home for me, but a shock for somebody used to March weather in Seattle. It took us almost another hour to ride a taxi into Bangkok and through the traffic to the Dusitani Hotel, where Christy had booked us through an agent in Seattle. I usually don’t stay in the fancy hotels when I’m in Bangkok, preferring the less expensive places that have much more liberal policies on allowing visitors in your room late at night. This time, since Auerbauch was going to pay the bill, I decided to splurge a bit and stick close to my new partner. The management put me in a room right next door. Now it was her clock that was off, not mine, so | suggested she spend the afternoon resting, not bothering to correct her assumption that I was going to get right to work. All I wanted to do was take it easy, Thai style. I dropped down to Napoleon’s Lounge, a place on Patpong ' Road that has a great jazz session on Sunday afternoons. I saw a couple of old friends, made some noncommittal remarks about where I had been, and had a draft Singha beer and a steak sandwich. Later I went back to the hotel room and reread the file. After that, I pulled some paper out of the desk and started to outline a strategy for looking into the chances that Abe Auerbauch might still be alive.

IV.

Christy was already eating breakfast when I walked into the hotel coffee shop the next morning.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘‘Sleep well?” ‘‘Like the dead, until three o’clock. Since then I’ve written six letters, reread the files, and discovered there’s

no morning TV in Bangkok.”’ ‘‘Even if there were,’’ I said, ‘‘it wouldn’t do you any good. The stations all broadcast in Thai.”’ ‘‘What are we going to do for the rest of the day?’’ ‘We aren’t going to do anything,”’ I told her. ‘‘I work alone, remember?’’ ‘“‘] don’t want to spend the day sitting in a hotel room,”’ she flared back at me. ‘‘I’m already bored, and it’s only 7:30.”’ ‘*So don’t sit in your room. Go take a tour. See the 48

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temples. Watch them milk cobras. Take a boat ride on

the river.”’ Her scowl told me what she thought about combining business with pleasure. I was beginning to wonder if she ever did anything for fun. Before I could think up a smart reply, one of the pretty waitresses every Bangkok hotel has in its coffee shop came up and handed me a menu. I checked, found they offered a breakfast steak, and ordered it. I watched the girl walk off with my order, her cute ass wiggling under the orange-checked uniform. *‘Come on,’’ I argued. ‘“‘What did Auerbauch hire you to do? He wants you to find out what I learn, then make a decision on whether or not to give Bumper Butz a go-ahead. The more you know about Asia and Thailand, the better the decision you can make. Don’t call it tourism; call it background information enhancement. Then that old fart will have to pay the fees.”’ She wasn’t going to surrender that easily. ‘‘Can’t I _ go along if I promise to keep quiet? Or are you afraid I'll discover your trade secrets?’’ ‘There aren’t any trade secrets,’’ I confessed. ‘‘Any damn fool ought to be able to do what I do. It still amazes me that people insist on paying me so much money to do something so simple.”’ ‘‘What do you mean?”’ ‘*Most of the time,’’ I explained, ‘‘if there is anything you want to know, there’s somebody else that already knows it. All you have to do is find that person and ask him.”’

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‘‘Even if that’s true, why should that person tell you once you find him? Do you offer to buy it?”’ ‘‘Bought information is bad information,’’ I answered. ‘‘People like to feel important, and they like to talk. That’s all there is to it. You find the right person, turn him into a friend, and you listen.”’ ‘‘T have a terrible feeling that my boss wasted a lot of money,’’ she said with a bit of a shudder. What the hell, I thought, I guess what I do is so simple, nobody will believe it works. So I'll keep taking people’s money to do what they ought to be able to do themselves. They served the steak like they’re supposed to serve one at breakfast, with fresh egg on top. I sprinkled some Magi sauce over it and dug in, half expecting a lecture on cholesterol from across the table. When I finished, I called the waitress back, signed the bill for both our breakfasts over Miss Hammond’s

objection,

and stood up. ‘“‘Come on,”’ I said as she got to her feet. ‘‘People start work in Bangkok early. I'll drop you by the tour desk on my way out.”’ Auerbauch didn’t trust governments, and neither do I, when you’re talking about presidents, senators, press secretaries, anyone who takes pride in being a politician, and the average bureaucrat dealing with a stranger, especially one that might cause problems. But a lot of fairly decent people end up working for governments. Their decency guarantees they won’t get the rapid promotions, and they are always mistrusted by those ambi-

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tious weasels willing to suck cock on their way to the

top. Find that honest, hardworking fellow who thinks he is supposed to be working for the taxpayer, give him a chance to talk, and you can trust him, once he learns he can trust you. I would have preferred to start the day with Steve Austin, an old friend and former colleague. The problem was that if I wanted to see Steve during working hours, I had to go into the embassy. Our wonderful foreign policies over the last forty years have won us so many friends around the world we have to build our embassies to the security standard of a Foreign Legion post. With the new barbwire on top of the surrounding wall and the steel gates that are opened only to let in cars with the proper I.D. badges, the U.S. embassy in Bangkok riot only looks like a fort under siege, it is more difficult to gain entry. Even an ex-employee like _me has to show a passport or I.D. card, sign forms, wear a visitor’s tag, and wait in the lobby for some secretary to come down and escort me to the upper floors. Rather than go through the hassle, I called Steve on the phone and invited him to lunch. That done, I grabbed one of the hotel taxis to the Thai national police headquarters, where I walked up two flights of stairs and into the office of a police colonel without showing an I.D. once. ‘*Khun Maakan,’’ Colonel Pichai shouted as he saw

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me come through the door. ‘‘Long time, no see. What kind trouble you in?”’ I’ve known Pichai since he was a captain, and his English hasn’t improved a bit in all that time. He still can’t get the American pronunciation of my name, but ‘‘Maakan’’ is close enough. ‘‘No trouble,’’ I assured him, “‘just wondered if you might give me a bit of time.”’ ‘‘Sure thing,’ he said as he motioned me into his private office. We took a few minutes to talk about how long it had been since we had talked last, Pichai still practicing his English. A young girl in a police uniform came in and served the obligatory cups of strong coffee with sweetened milk and the tea chasers. When we had given the polite formalities all the time they needed, I began speaking Thai and got down to work. ‘“What’s going on along the Lao border these days?’’ I asked. He looked at me with a little surprise, then answered, ‘“*Same as always. We stay on our side; they stay on their side. Once in a while, somebody tries to swim across the river. They shoot at the swimmer; if the bullets make it to our side, we duck.”’ ‘‘What about intelligence?’’ I asked. ‘‘Your people have any ideas about what is going on in the country?’’ ‘A few,’’ he said with a bit of a smile. ‘‘Several hundred Russian advisors are making the same mistakes trying to convert our cousins into a socialist paradise that you people made trying to create a western democracy.”’ ‘‘One more example of the white man out to save

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little brown brother?’’ We both smiled together at what had become an old, but rather painful joke between us. **What do you think the chances are there are any of my white brothers still there?’’ I continued. The smirk on his face told me that he knew where the conversation was heading. “‘Little brother, I hope you aren't joining the chase after those mythical creatures. If we had any information on U.S. soldiers still being held prisoner, we’d pass it on to your embassy the same day we got it. We hear tell there’s another valiant American in town trying to mount another rescue operation. What do you know about that?’’ I told him the truth, but not all the truth, which was exactly what he was doing with me. I didn’t give any names and he didn’t ask for any. That meant that he already knew Bumper Butz. I had gotten pretty much what I expected. One important thing I had done was give the police some idea of what I was working on. That wouid help keep me out of trouble with them, and Pichai would pass me infor‘mation, if he found any, and it wouldn’t cost him anything to let me know about it. The reason our friendship has lasted so long is that we each expect the other to act only in his own self-interest. When his and mine match, we deal. When they don’t, we still stay friends. I left the police department and took a cab across - town to the Ministry of Interior, where I looked up a friend in the department of local administration, which is responsible for all the governors and district officers in the ceuntry. The conversation was pretty much a repeat of the one in Colonel Pichai’s office.

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I spent a total of an hour and a half in meetings and an hour and a half in traffic jams, which is pretty much typical of a working morning in Bangkok. I had to rush back to the Patpong area, where I was to meet Steve Austin. While Patpong Road is world famous for its tawdry nightlife, a few places are also open for lunch. One of them, the Executive Lounge, is run by an ex-Air America type who serves the best hamburger in town, including those found in the recently opened McDonald’s franchise. Steve was already sitting in one of the booths with a Singha beer in front and a good-looking bar girl on the side. He was wearing a tie, which went with his job at

the embassy, but he had left his coat in the office. He had forgotten to take his embassy I.D. tag off, and it was hanging from a clip on his shirt pocket. I knew I wasn’t interrupting anything in the making when I slipped onto the opposite bench. Steve is on his second tour in Thailand. On the first one, he lucked into one of the finest ladies I’ve ever met, a fair-skinned beauty from Chiang Mai who thinks Steve created the world just for the two of them. He doesn’t make an issue of his monogamy, but he used the excuse of my arrival to run the girl off to find herself a more likely potential candidate for an afternoon quickie. ‘How are Chintana and the kids?’’ I asked as I sat down. . ‘*Great! When I called to tell her I wouldn’t be home for lunch, she wondered why I didn’t insist on us eating at our house.”’

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**Tell her I’ve been there so many times, I won’t go back until she lets me take you both out on the town.”’ I ordered a beer and a hamburger, while we bounced _ a bit of bullshit back and forth across the table. “So what’s the great international troubleshooter into these days?’’ Steve asked after a bit. Steve, I trust. He is probably the only person in the profession who understands why I got out of the Foreign Service. He agrees with most of my reasons, but he doesn’t have a rich father, so he’s hanging in to get the pension at fifty, doing the best and the most honest job he can. I described the deal, starting with the meeting in Auerbauch’s office and reviewing what I knew about Bumper Buiz. Steve kept interrupting with groans of growing intensity, occasionally adding a shake of the head or a shudder of the shoulders. One of the bar girls served my hamburger and I stopped long enough to take a bite. **‘God save us from the stupid and the brave,’’ Steve ‘said while I chewed, ‘‘especially when they march together.”’ ‘*You know anything about this Bumper Butz?’’ I asked as soon as I could swallow. ‘‘!’m not directly involved with the MIA issue, but I hear enough in staff meetings and see enough of the traffic to know this is bad news. It could fuck up sixmonths’ negotiations with the Lao government.’’ ‘‘What negotiations?” ‘*You ought to read more than the financial and business sections while you lie around on the beach,”’

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he told me. ‘‘Two weeks ago, the Lao government let us take a casualty team in for a ground investigation of a C-130 crash site. It’s a real breakthrough. But every time we talk to the Lao, they scream about these private rescue attempts. They think somebody in the American government puts these nuts up to this kind of thing.”’ ‘*So big deal. We keep a leash on people like Bumper Butz and the Lao government lets us look for corpses. That doesn’t do a thing for the living.”’ ‘‘Suppose there are still living prisoners,’’ Steve argued. ‘‘There is no way a private invasion force work- — ing without good intelligence is going to get in, find the prisoners, release them, then get out. We both got a good laugh out of the movies Hollywood keeps making for the money, but this is real life. The Lao government doesn’t keep a ready fleet of helicopters standing by for the rescue team to steal for their escape.”’ Steve lifted his beer glass, drained it, then waved to one of the girls to bring us each another. “‘No,’’ he continued, ‘‘even if there were live MIAs in Laos—and I personally don’t think there are—the only way we will ever get them out is by negotiating them out, unless we want to start the war all over again.”’ ‘*So how do you explain the personal effects of one of the pilots turning up after all these years?’’ ‘I can’t,’’ he answered. ‘‘I’d like to know a lot more about the man who claims he brought them out of Laos. What did you say his name was?’’ I hadn’t mentioned the name yet, but I couldn’t think of any reason why I shouldn’t. ‘‘Wilai, Wilai Phaksabai.’’

Steve has a lot better memory for names than I do.

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He sat there thinking for about fifteen seconds, then suddenly blurted out, *‘I hope that’s not the same Wilai I’m thinking about. I’d hate to think that sleazy son of a bitch is back at work again!”’ *“You mean you think you might know this guy?”’ ‘‘That’s the problem with Thai last names,’’ he reminded me. ‘‘Nobody ever uses them. It’s always Mister First Name. So half the time you don’t even know the guy’s last name. But if it’s the same man I’m thinking about, you know him, too. There was a time when just about every American official in town got the pitch for one or another of his grandiose schemes.”’ *‘Oh shit!’ I said, Steve’s reminder prying a forgotten memory out of the back of my mind. ‘*You don’t mean that fat turd who proposed to sell the CIA a deal trading Thai surplus rice for M-16s for Cambodian insurgents?” ‘That was one of them. Another time he tried to con the Drug Enforcement Administration into letting him buy the Golden Triangle’s entire opium production for ‘the year. All he wanted was $20 million and he promised he would get heroin off the streets of America. Then there was the surplus-property con, the cornpurchasing con, and God knows how many others. There’s not an American agency in Bangkok that doesn’t have a Wilai file someplace. As far as we know, he -never succeeded in anything.”’ ‘“*T couldn’t ever figure out how he kept going,”’ I added. *‘Simple,’’ Austin explained. ‘‘He never hit the same agency twice. Nobody ever shares files, so each time

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somebody would give his latest scheme a serious hearing for a while.”’ ‘“‘If he never succeeds in conning old Uncle Sam, how does he pay the sss I asked. ‘‘He’s got to be making money some way.’ ‘*He shakes it out of innocent Thai citizens who think he’s for real. He convinces them he’s about to close a big deal with the U.S. government, but that he needs some cash first.’’ ‘‘How does he do that?’’ I asked. *“You know us bureaucrats, we always answer our mail. Wilai starts by writing letters to whatever agency he’s targeting. Somebody always answers the letters, even if it’s just to tell him no. So Wilai has a fine collection of letters on official U.S. stationery that he waves in front of faces as proof he has friends in the embassy. Most of his victims aren’t that well educated and can’t tell the difference between a bureaucratic no and a real yes.”’ ‘‘T’m surprised he’s still on the loose,’’ I said. ‘*So am I,’’ Steve replied. ‘‘I guess he’s just bright enough to keep from making the kind of mistakes that could get him thrown into jail. The Thai government did try a couple of years ago, but dropped the case for lack of evidence. We fixed it so he can’t get a visa, and we passed a memo to every U.S. agency in town, suggesting they not answer mail from him. Next, we found he was writing U.S. congressmen. I haven’t heard anything about him lately, until you brought up his name.”’ ‘But you’re not sure it’s the same man.”’

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“‘No, but I will be after I check a few files.”’ “If it is the same man, is there any chance he went into the smuggling business?’’ I asked. ‘‘Could he be for real this time?’’ “If it’s the same Wilai we know and love, it’s more likely he’s back into the fraud game, this time with Bumper Butz and your friend in Seattle as the targets.”’ ‘Any suggestions how I prove it?’’ “‘'d say those personal effects are the answer,’’ Steve suggested. ‘Find out where they’ve been for the last thirteen years and you’ll solve the puzzle.’’ I asked Steve to check around the embassy and see if anybody else knew about Bumper Butz and his plans. He promised he’d do what he could. We ordered another round, and talked about the old days before he’d met Chintana.

Twenty

minutes

later, I paid the bill,

asking for a receipt so the generous Auerbauch could cover it. I spent the rest of the afternoon dropping in on a few more friends around town. Every place I went I got a couple of groans whenever I mentioned Wilai’s name. The fellow was a busy little man, but nobody could remember the last name, so I still wasn’t sure he was the same man. Other than that, I got nothing new. Finally, I checked back at the hotel and found that Christy was still out on some tour. I left a note for her to call me when she got in, then went up to my room to worry the problem a bit while I waited. - She called about 5:30. ‘*How did it go?’’ I asked. ‘I took the Temple of the Emerald Buddha and the

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Grand Palace tour,’’ she explained. ‘“‘It’s beautiful. I got so involved in looking at it all, I couldn’t leave. The tour came back without me and I had to find my own taxi.’ As she told it, finding a taxi in Bangkok was the final exam for World Traveler I. I threw in a few polite words while I listened to her ramble on. It looked like we had another victim of the instant infatuation with Thailand syndrome. I couldn’t blame her for that; I never got over my case. As people who get hit by the special character of the country sometimes go native in other ways, it looked like a good time to suggest we get together over dinner. ‘Only if you take me someplace where we can try real Thai food,’’ she answered when I got through the enthusiasm to ask the question about something to eat. ‘‘No problem,’’ I told her. ‘‘Meet me in the lobby at 6:30.” I figured the Jit Pochana off Sukumvit Road would be the best place to start out with real Thai food. Over the years the owners have managed to cater to growing numbers of foreign guests without sacrificing the integrity of true Thai taste. Most of the time the Thai clientele still outnumber the farang. ‘‘Farang?’’ she said as we sat down in the restau-— rant’s outdoor garden. ‘‘I keep hearing that word. What

does it mean?’’ “It’s what the Thai call us round-eyed white people. It’s a Thai attempt at saying Frank. The French were the first Europeans out this way back in the Middle Ages.”’

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I explained that the Thai eat family style and suggested she let me order a few things for us both. She agreed and we soon had a sweet green curry, some crispy noodles, a shrimp lemon grass soup, and pieces of pork threaded on bamboo sticks with a hot peanut sauce in which to dip them. There was very cold Singha beer to wash it all down. Christy looked at the food and asked where the chopsticks were. *‘The Thai don’t use them,’’ I explained, ‘‘unless they’re eating in a Chinese restaurant. They use a spoon and a fork, holding the spoon in the right hand, like this.”’ We both went after the food for a while, Christy wincing at the spicy taste of the chile in the curry and the soup. I told her to eat lots of rice to cut the burn a bit. After taking a long drink of her beer, she asked, ‘‘What about you? Learn anything?’’ I didn’t want to get involved in daily reports, especially when all I had was a bit of gossip and a chance ‘that Wilai might be someone I had already dealt with. “Tl picked up a few things,’’ I told her, “‘nothing definite, but it’s a start.’ She must have remembered Auerbauch’s orders about not interfering, because she went back to talking about her day. The longer we talked, the friendlier it all got, even if listening to details of Thai temples is about as exciting to me as hearing an analysis of the way my teeth line up—they are pretty, but I see them every morning. I let her ramble on. I learned a long time ago that the best way for a big ugly bastard like me to get along

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with a pretty woman is to listen to what she says, ask questions that show I’m following the conversation, and demonstrate interest in her ideas, as long as they don’t get too kooky or libby. It wasn’t hard to do with Christy. She had a twist in her approach that started making the temples sound interesting again. I got so interested, I almost didn’t see who came in with a couple of friends—Jim Landgrebe, Consolidated’s man in Bangkok. The last time we had talked was the day he showed up at the door of my bungalow in Pattaya with Auerbauch’s offer and the ticket to Seattle. He asked then for me to call him when I got back. I hadn’t promised I would, and after Auerbauch made it clear he didn’t want me working through the Bangkok office, I couldn’t think of a reason to do so. I wasn’t surprised to see him in the same restaurant we had picked. The expatriate American community in Bangkok isn’t that big and a lot of us hit the same places to eat. Even knowing he was there, I still wouldn’t have spent the energy required to attract his attention, but he saw me. He was already in his chair when he did. He said something to his friends, jumped up, and headed my way, putting on the smiles and good cheer as he came. Christy had her back aimed in his direction, so he couldn’t get a make on her until he got right up to the table. _

He stuck there! When chair beside if I join you

his hand out-as he arrived and said, ‘‘Hi did you get back?’’ He grabbed an empty Christy, moving it back as he asked, ‘‘Mind for a minute?”’

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Before I could tell him I did, he glanced in Christy’s direction. I saw surprise knock the grin off his face, leaving the corners of his mouth still turned up with his teeth showing. It took him a couple of painful seconds before he could get it together to ask, ‘‘Christy Hammond! What are you doing in Bangkok?’ ‘‘It appears,’’ I interjected, ‘‘I don’t have to worry about introductions.”’ ‘“‘Of course not, Morgan,’’ Christy said, motioning Landgrebe into the empty chair. ‘‘Jim gets back to Seattle quite often. Well, Jim, surprised to see J. J.’s hatchet girl in Bangkok?”’ *‘Come on, Christy,’’ Jim answered back, ‘‘you still don’t hold that against me, do you?”’ **Are you saying you really didn’t mean it?”’ He was pleading, not asking. ‘‘Don’t make me pay for a remark made at the end of a liquid party. Anyway, you were the one who told Les Kinder that he didn’t - have to bother going back to Singapore, that he was out of the company.”’ ‘**You’re right,’’ she answered, ““because that’s the way J. J. wanted it. He got his jollies sending a woman to give that incompetent bastard his walking papers. If you don’t likeit, you should take it up with J. J.”’ This was a fight I wasn’t having any fun watching from the sidelines. It looked like Christy could hold her own with the worst of the bastards, if she wanted to. I didn’t know Landgrebe all that well, largely because I hadn’t seen anything I wanted to know. Now he was sucking air like a hooked fish. He should have fought

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back. If women want to play on a rainy field, they had better be ready for a bit of mud. But Landgrebe acted more like a beat puppy, trying for one more lick of the master’s hand. ‘‘For what it’s worth, I apologize again,’’ he said before he got down to what was really chipping at him. ‘Why didn’t anyone let me know you were coming?”’ It wasn’t a casual question. There was a tremor in his voice and the sweat was popping out on his upper lip. I’d worked too long in bureaucracies not to sympathize with the poor slug. Here he was, the company’s representative in Thailand, and the boss’s executive assistant shows up unannounced. It was enough to terrorize any organization man. It would have taken about two sentences for Christy to calm the worries sloshing around in his empty mind. Yet all she said was, ‘“‘Don’t worry about it, Jim. ’m not here looking at your operation.”’ Jim was in a corner where even a cowardly bear will fight back. ‘‘Don’t give me that,’’ he argued. ‘‘We both know that J. J. eats, drinks, and sleeps Consolidated business. I have a right to know what’s going on. If he doesn’t trust me, he ought to tell me.’’ ‘‘?’m sure he will, Jim,’’ she answered, ‘‘when he

thinks that’s what needs to be done. What I’m doing here doesn’t concern you, so please go away.”’ Landgrebe sat there a minute with six different emotions fighting over the right to control his face. He got up slowly. “‘I guess you’re right,’’ he told her. ‘‘It couldn’t be anything important for Consolidated. Auerbauch may play games when he fires somebody in

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Seattle, but he wouldn’t send a woman all the way out here for something that mattered. Let me know if you need any help with whatever errands you're running.”’ He turned around and walked back in the direction of his two friends. ‘That son of a bitch!’’ Christy whispered under her breath as he walked away. ‘What's your beef with the man?’’ I asked. ‘‘Why didn’t you just say it was a personal matter that didn’t concern the company?”’ **Let him sweat. He’s so typical of the kind of men that Auerbauch hires. They have to be big and toughlooking but willing to crawl in the presence of the great man at the top. The gag line is that Jim thinks all us girls are dying for the chance to drop our panties and crawl under him.”’ ‘Christ!’ I argued. ‘‘You can’t blame a guy for trying.”’ ‘‘Not his way. He put the make on me in that same - conference in Seattle, by surprise. I made the mistake of going into his hotel room when I dropped by to pick up some reports. He favors the grab-and-grope approach. I almost had to scream for help before I could get him convinced I wasn’t going to love it.”’ I kept looking for an opening that would get us back on temples and Thai silk. ‘‘What tore it,’’ she continued, ‘‘was I know he wasn’t all that hot for me anyway. Everybody knew one of the secretaries in the international division was scratching his itch at night. It was just a chance to get close to the

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boss. He must have thought I would give him the office secrets out of gratitude for a little servicing.”’ We had pretty much worked our way through the dinner, so I called the waiter over and suggested she try one of the Thai desserts made of coconut. I ordered coffee for myself. I hoped the break in her monologue would let her get back to more pleasant things, but she couldn’t let it go. ‘It turns out,’’ she went on, ‘‘he’s the type that gets nasty when he gets told no. All I did was deliver Les a letter. I didn’t know what was in it. Jim started the story going around that I had fired Les.”’ She paused a bit, shook her head, and added, “‘I stopped trying to deny it all when I realized the story was working to my advantage, making all the bastards a bit nervous every time I walked into the room. God! What a bore.”’ I had learned all I ever wanted to know about Consolidated International and a whole lot more besides. The information wasn’t worth the cost of a nice evening, but neither one of them had asked my opinion before they had their fight. Christy ate her dessert, her mood so foul that she made none of the comments that had been passed on all the dishes served before Landgrebe. I tried to get it back, asking questions about her day, commenting on some Thai customs, throwing out anything I thought might catch her mental fancy. I even let her pay the bill when she reached for it, figuring this was not the time to challenge modern ideas of femininity. I made my last attempt at getting the evening going

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again as we walked out to look for a taxi. I suggested we go see a bit of Bangkok’s nightlife. She begged off, claiming tourist fatigue and a lingering case of jet lag. So I flagged down a cab, took her back to the hotel, got our keys, and went all the way to her door, where we shook hands. She went in for the night; I didn’t. It wasn’t even ten o'clock and I was bored, frustrated, and horny. Nobody has to stay that way in Bangkok. Sure, I know there are a lot of American men who like to brag they never pay for it. That’s probably okay back in the States, where there’s so much free stuff walking around. Anyway, professional sex back home is usually sold for psychotic reasons, not economic. In Asia, it’s different. You can’t blame a lot of young girls for deciding they would prefer to rent their twat out in the city rather than work in a rice paddy for twelve hours a day while they spend their nights under a farmer trying to fill the average quota of eight kids in a - lifetime. In Bangkok, if you ask a pretty girl how she got in a place like the bar you’re in, she’ll tell you that she was just lucky. So it’s a man’s world, and I’m one of a large group of expatriates that live there because we enjoy it. We would all rather get it for love. But the only men in Asia who don’t buy it from time to time are the very few who are happily married to women just as horny as they are, the religious nuts, the queers, the ones who have a love affair going with their hand, and those who don’t have the money to pay for it.

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I walked straight back to the elevator and rode it down. The Dusitani Hotel has two lobbies, an upper and a lower. The upper lobby is where the desk is. You get to it from the outside by riding up a large ramp to what is really the second floor. The lower lobby is on the ground floor, only it’s not much of a lobby, just another way to get in and out of the hotel. I put my room key in my pocket and walked out a side door nearest to where I was going, Patpong Road, a four-block walk from the Dusitani. Once there, I pushed my way through the tourists and touts and found a bar that didn’t have loud music, porno shows, or Germans on a sex vacation. It did have good whiskey and pretty women, including a couple I knew, like the word ‘‘knew’’ is used in the Book of Genesis. I ignored them and went for someone I had never met before who couldn’t have been.over twenty. I ordered a Scotch and bought her the usual Coke served in a tea glass. We didn’t talk about Buddhism, the crisis along the Cambodian border, the place of women in the work force, Thai history, or contemporary dance. We did giggle a lot, order more Scotch for me and more Coke for her, and agreed we ought to find someplace a little more quiet. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to sneak her through the lobby of the Dusitani without tipping a doorman a half-month’s wages,

so we walked down the street to

the Suriwong Hotel, where rooms rent by the hour or the night. She didn’t have sandy-colored curls where her legs came together. Like a lot of girls from northeastern

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Thailand, she didn’t have any curls there, just a little fuzz and the basic equipment, which she quickly put to work around the randiest part of me. For a while there, we were made for each other as I lost myself in the illusion of true love. We did the first time in a hurry. The second time took longer, both getting ready and getting there. Then we took a shower together, washing off the sweat and the juices. From the shower we went back to bed, tangling ourselves together with the sheet and going to sleep. I woke up hours later, still half in a dream. I reached out, searching for the long, sandy-colored hair I had just been running my fingers through and found shiny black hair instead. The girl stirred and I moved away,

hoping she wouldn’t wake up and discover I was ready again. I didn’t want the illusion; I wanted the real thing, even when I knew I couldn’t have it.

I woke up about 5:30, untangled myself from the sheet and the girl, dressed, put a couple of purple 500-baht notes by the girl’s purse, and left her sleeping there. | walked back through the quiet streets, the neon lights on, but the morning breaking. The traffic was already starting to build up when I walked through the Dusitani parking lot, into the lower lobby, and over to the elevator. Even a four-block walk in the early morning can cause one to build up a sweat in Bangkok. As soon as I got in the room, I took my clothes off and jumped in the shower. | was getting well soaped when the phone rang. I figured some idiot at the desk got the wrong room for a wake-up call, so I let it ring while I rinsed off. It started ringing again as I walked out of the bathroom still drying off with the towel. It was Christy Hammond, and she was mad. 70

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‘““Morgan, where have you been all night?’’ She asked it like my ex-wife used to ask the question, knowing damn well where I’d been, but hoping I would have an explanation she liked better. ‘‘T don’t remember hiring you as a keeper,’’ I answered. “You could have at least called when you got in. I left messages at the desk to have you call no matter what time it was.”’ **T didn’t check with the desk,’’ I explained. ‘‘What was the emergency that made it so important that you get hold of me in the middle of the night?”’ ‘‘Bumper Butz called me. He’s in Bangkok and he says it’s urgent Auerbauch make a decision. They are going to move the prisoners and then it will be too late. He called Auerbauch in Seattle. Auerbauch told him I was in Bangkok and he should talk to me. I wanted to talk to you before I agreed to anything, so I tried to put him off while I got hold of you. He kept calling back ~ and insisting we get together. I finally had to tell him about you, so he’d stop insisting I go see him last night.”’ **T’ll bet he loved that,’’ I told her.

‘He said some very nasty things to me. He claimed that Auerbauch had broken the deal by bringing someone else in. Then he cooled down and said he wants to talk to us both.”’ ‘*Fine,’’ I told her. “‘Where does he want to meet us?”’ ‘*He’s going to call back again this morning. He says

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he has to be careful. He’s afraid the Thai police will stop the operation if they can.”’ I told her to call me as soon as she learned where we were supposed to meet him. I also suggested she ought to tell him that I would meet him alone. I argued that she might not only get caught in the middle, she could get damaged. That got the response I expected. She wanted to play spy lady, and she wasn’t going to give up a chance to do so. What the hell. It was too early in the morning to have a fight, especially with somebody who had been waiting up all night for the opportunity. I hung up and got dressed. The only clean set of clothes I had left was a light brown safari suit. That would do fine, as I planned on calling on some Thai officials and most of them wore the same thing, when they weren’t wearing their uniforms. I stuffed some dirty clothes into one of the plastic bags the hotel provides and left it for the maid to pick up. I hate sending out laundry in an international-class hotel. They charge four times too much, even in Bangkok, and they don’t do that good a job. I had to get back to my bungalow in Pattaya soon and lay in a fresh

supply.

.

I figured I had time to eat a bit of breakfast, so I ordered some bacon and eggs with coffee from room service, telling them to hurry it or I wouldn’t take it.

Eight minutes later when I heard the knock, I wondered how they managed to get my breakfast so quickly. I opened the door to find Christy standing there. ‘*Butz called again,’’ she announced.

meet us in a half hour.’’

‘‘He wants to

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‘‘Where?”’ I asked, hoping to stall for a bit of time to let the food get there. ‘*He says he can’t let us know where he is. It’s too dangerous. He’s arranged to have us picked up.”’ *‘Downstairs?”’ I asked, still not giving up on breakfast. ‘‘No, we’re supposed to take a taxi to some place.”’ She looked in her hand at a piece of notepaper the hotel puts by the phone in the rooms. ‘‘Hualalampong Station.’’ It took her a couple of tries to get it all out. ‘‘He said someone will pick us up there.’’ ‘“*That’s the train station,’’ I told her. ‘‘The trains come in from upcountry in the morning. There will be a lot of farangs there. How will he tell us from the rest?”’ ‘*T described us both. There can’t be many men over six feet tall, with a beard on their face and an aging blonde at their side.’’ She hesitated a couple of seconds, then added, using her this-is-embarrassing voice, ‘*‘Ma-

jor Butz told me we shouldn’t carry anything, and we should hold hands so his man can identify us.”’ Hell, that proposal made it almost worth missing breakfast. We had to wait about three minutes for the elevator. When the door finally opened, a waiter came out carrying my bacon and eggs. I stopped him, gave him enough money to cover the cost, and wished him bon appétit. On the way down, Christy told me that she had already eaten breakfast while she was waiting for me to come back from wherever I had spent the night. I resisted a powerful urge to tell her that I would rather

get laid than eat anyday.

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The night tourist train from Chiang Mai had just arrived and the railroad station was a mess of moving people. We got out of the taxi and went into the terminal, where we spent the next ten minutes walking back and forth through the mob. I felt sillier with each swing of our tightly clasped hands. We had two false alarms, scrubby men insisting we go with them only to prove to be cabbies looking for lucrative fares. I thought that was what the third approach was until I realized he was calling me Maakan with the exact same pronunciation as my friend Colonel Pichai uses. . ““You come me. We go quick see Maijaa Put.’’ He headed toward the exit to the parking lot, never looking back to see if we were following. ‘‘That’s Major Butz, pronounced his way,’’ I told a puzzled Christy. ‘‘We might as well follow him.”’ As soon as she realized we had made the contact, she let go of my hand. So far, that had been the only fun part of the morning. She hurried after the contact and I followed along behind, checking the crowd as I went to see if anyone else was interested in us. Our guide had a twenty-year-old dented, faded green Mercedes parked in the lot. There was a driver waiting in the front seat behind the wheel. Christy and I got in the back seat, and the guide crawled in beside the driver. They both kept twisting and turning as they drove out of the lot, trying to make sure that we hadn’t

invited the Royal Thai Army to follow along. They drove us across town and past the Victory Monument, a tall, square penis sticking up in the mid-

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dle of a giant traffic circle, which celebrates Thailand’s participation in the First World War on the winning side. From there we jerked through Bangkok’s permanent traffic jam a few yards at a time, heading in the direction of the airport. From start to finish, we drove about three miles, but in Bangkok’s morning traffic, that takes almost an hour. The old car wasn’t air conditioned, and we breathed a couple of cigarette packs’ worth of bus pollution along the way. From Phaholyotin Road, the driver turned off into one of the side streets the Thai call a soi. We were into a residential area where a lot of Americans used to live back in the sixties and early seventies when we were trying so hard to save that part of the world. Now it’s mostly upper-middle-class Thai businessmen and government officials. The driver pulled over and stopped. Our guide turned around, waving a couple of dirty red bandanas in our direction. ‘‘Must put on eyes,’’ he said. ‘‘No can see where Maijaa Put live.”’ I would have called a halt to the bullshit right then, saying he either take us to see Major Butz with our eyes open or he could fuck himself, but Christy was into the game. She was already helping the man tie the blindfold over her eyes. She was having fun playing intrigue, and she wasn’t going to appreciate my challenging the rules. What the hell, I thought, as long as they don’t tie my hands, I’ll go along. I didn’t give them any help, though. When they finished, I found they hadn’t done

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that good of a job. I could still see a bit under the lower edge of the cloth, enough to keep pretty good track of where we were. I wondered if they had been as sloppy with Christy’s blindfold. If they had, she probably was closing her eyes. We drove another mile or so, winding around with the twists of the street, but not heading in any new directions. As a security operation, the morning’s performance had been so bad I couldn’t decide whether the whole thing was an act to make us think they were serious, or we were dealing with some of the most incompetent dirty-trick people in the world. The car turned into a driveway and our chauffeur honked the horn a couple of times. I heard a gate swing open and we drove into a residential compound. Our two friends helped us out of the car and led us up some steps to a porch where they told us to take off our shoes before going inside. Nothing strange about that; the Thai never wear their shoes in the house. Once we were

inside, they took off the blindfolds.

We were standing in a living room. It had been an expensive house at one time, but the parquet floor we were standing on was worn and scratched, and the furniture scattered around the room looked ready for the goodwill truck, if there had been such a thing in Thailand. A window air conditioner whistled and snorted as it pumped half-cooled air into the room. The windows were all curtained so we couldn’t see out. There were stairs leading from the living room up to the second floor; an American came down them. He was about six feet tall, in his early or mid-forties

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with muscles that it takes work to keep. His black hair had a military-style cut, and he wore a mustache trimmed to regulation measurements. Barefoot and wearing an open sport shirt with tan slacks, he still looked like he was in uniform. At the bottom of the stairs, he walked over and stuck out his hand in Christy’s direction. ‘‘Hello, Miss Hammond. Welcome to Bangkok. Please forgive the inconvenience of the blindfold.’’ Christy bubbled something that said she understood, as she shook his hand. The man I assumed was Bumper Butz turned in my direction. “‘Hello, Itchy Snatch,’’ he said in what sounded like perfect Thai. He followed that with a couple of sentences in what must have been Thai, but was totally unintelligible. It took me a moment to realize that the “Itchy Snatch’’ was a terrible mispronunciation of the usual Thai mispronunciation of Morgan. Having demonstrated his profound expertise in the Thai language, Bumper switched back to English and suggested we take a seat and get things settled. He began by repeating the arguments he had made to Christy on the phone about the need to get moving. ‘‘Without the money Auerbauch promised, we can’t do a thing,”’ he said. ‘‘If he comes through right now, we can still get this operation going before they move the prisoners.”’ ‘‘How come after thirteen years, they all of a sudden are going to move the prisoners?’’ I asked. ‘‘And where are they going to move them?”’ ‘‘My sources have found out they are going to take

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into North

Vietnam,’’

he answered,

using that

military briefing tone that demands belief without argument or question. ‘“‘The Vietnamese and the Russians are insisting on it. They don’t trust the Lao. They’re afraid the Lao will use the prisoners to make a separate deal for economic assistance.”’ ‘‘When’s this supposed to take place?’’ I asked. ‘‘In about six weeks,’’ Bumper answered. ‘‘Then what’s the sudden rush?’’ ‘*This isn’t something we just suddenly do. I have twenty-five men identified that will go on the raid. But they’re scattered all over the U.S. We’ll need at least two weeks of training as a unit and they have to fly out

here a few at a time. It will take almost $50,000 in air fares to fly twenty-five of them out here with return tickets in their pockets.’’ He slid forward on the seat of his chair, staring at Christy, his voice intense with emphasis on each sentence. *“My Thai partner will provide another one hundred men, all Thai army veterans,’’ he continued. ‘‘We can’t risk trying to smuggle weapons in, so we have to buy them from arms traffickers here. That takes lots of up-front money. The Thai mercenaries won’t do it for free, and they want the money in the bank before it starts.”’ He paused to catch his breath. for a second, then continued. ‘‘There is no way we can do it without Auerbauch’s $3 million. He promised the money.’’ Butz probed Christy with his eyes. ‘‘Where is it?’’. I think Christy would have liked to have given him the money right then. But she remembered her instruc-

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tions from old J. J. ‘My employer promised the money only after he is convinced his grandson is alive and that there’s a chance a rescue operation will work,’’ Christy reminded him. ‘“That’s why we’re here. We want to see better proof it’s for real.’’ *‘My God!’ Butz shouted. ‘‘What kind of proof do we have to come up with? Auerbauch has the things his grandson had when his plane went down. My Thai partner saw the prisoners, and damned near got himself caught and killed doing it. What else do you want?’’ Either Butz was a damned good actor or he believed in what he was telling us. I decided he was for real, not some clever con operator. He was convinced the prisoners were there; he wanted to go in and get them; and he would make the try, if he had the money. But a lot of fools have marched straight into hell thinking they were on the road to glory. Butz believing in it didn’t make it true. Even if it was, why go about it the hard way? ‘‘Suppose what you’re saying is true,’’ I said. - **Wouldn’t it make more sense to turn the information over to the embassy? The U.S. government would have a lot better chance of getting those men out than a private rescue operation.”’ I thought for a minute that Butz was going to hit me. He got up and started in my direction. He must have decided I wasn’t worth hitting, because he preached at me instead. ‘‘Adams, you can’t be that dumb. The fucking politicians never let us win the war. They left thirteen hundred good men out here, while they pandered to the dykes and cowards back home. They don’t give a shit

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whether our men are alive or dead. The bastards in Washington and the shit-lickers in the embassy play silly games and the Lao let them pick up a few bones once in a while. Those wonderful wizards in Washington don’t want anybody alive. That would prove what a bunch of turds they’ve been all along. The only way we can save those men is to go do it ourselves.”’ ‘‘That may be,’’ I said, ‘‘but it looks to me that you’re asking us to put a lot of faith in your Thai partner. I’d like to hear him make his own arguments. I take it you’re talking about the name you gave to Auerbauch, Wilai Phaksabai?’’ “*Wilai is still mad at me for giving out his name,”’ Butz explained. “‘The rest of us can go back to the States, once we rescue the prisoners. Wilai’s stuck here. His own government would throw him in jail if they knew what he’s involved in.”’ ‘‘T assume,’’ I said, “‘that Wilai will be getting his cut of the action.”’ ‘Of course, and it’s going to be more because of today. Wilai refused to come unless I upped his fee.’’ *“You mean he’s here?’’ ‘‘Upstairs,’’ Butz answered. “‘I figured you’d insist on talking to him when Miss Hammond told me what you were out here for.”’ Butz got up and walked over to the stairs and hollered in his atrocious Thai for Wilai to come down. Two Thai men walked down the stairs and joined our group. It had been a long time, but I recognized the one in front. It was the same Wilai about whom Steve and I had talked. I was disappointed. Bumper had been doing

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such a good job of selling his rescue mission that I had been building my own illusions it might be for real. Wilai hadn’t changed much since I had seen him last. He still looked like a sloppy fat owner of a cutrate, upcountry whorehouse, one. where the customers have to screw on the premises because he doesn’t trust the girls to come back from a hotel. He was in his early fifties. His hair was solid black, but with a sheen that tattled on the dye job hiding the gray. He wore the kind of sparse mustache that more often hangs on the pimply face of an adolescent trying to look like a grown man. Wilai didn’t recognize me. I wasn’t wearing a beard when we last met and all us round-eyes look alike. Bumper handled the introductions while I acted like meeting Wilai was a whole new experience. The other Thai man was introduced as Captain Somsuk, a retired naval officer. That meant he had to be at least sixty, which was older than he looked, unless he had

_ been forced into an early retirement. Butz let me in on the secret that Captain Somsuk had lots of important contacts within Thai military circles and that he was one of Wilai’s most trusted business partners. The way Somsuk jumped every time Wilai spoke made me wonder how much Butz knew about Thai military circles. We all sat back down, and Bumper invited Wilai to tell us his story. Wilai’s English hadn’t improved a bit over the years. Captain Somsuk, who did speak-it well, translated for Wilai, with Wilai throwing in a few English words from time to time. A couple of times he tried to take over the story himself, then gave up when

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|

he couldn’t find the vocabulary he needed to make a point. Wilai’s story was a tale of intrigue, dangers, and hardships experienced by a dedicated man trying to provide the Lao citizenry with the goods of a capitalist society that their Communist government denied them. Wilai told us that he regularly crossed into Laos on his smuggling missions, that he had paid for cooperation of important Lao officials, and that he had seen Americans in a prison camp on several different occasions. It was a good story; it took a long time to tell. He threw in lots of little details about people, places, the weather when something happened, that sort of thing. He got emotional when he described how he had seen people beaten or killed. He sweated when he described his own escapes from death. Sometimes he’d laugh, sometimes he’d cry. A couple of times he choked up and we had to wait a few minutes while he got back in control. It was a great performance. I was the only skeptic. Bumper and Christy were hanging on every word, whispering oohs and aahs at all the proper spots. With radios, television, and movies to entertain us on a twentyfour-hour basis, Americans have lost the art of good storytelling. That makes us patsies for the tall tale when we get into another culture where people grew up entertaining each other instead of twisting knobs on a

boob box.

.

Wilai and Somsuk ended with a repeat of the news that the prisoners would be moved in about six weeks,

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and an argument that something had to be done immediately. I guess my disbelief showed, because Bumper got more and more nervous the longer it went on. Recognizing that I was a lost cause, he and Wilai focused on Christy. “‘Can you understand, Miss Hammond,’’ he said, ‘“‘why it’s so important we move fast? You owe it to your employer to make the decision now.”’ I decided I had better throw some water on the fire before Christy’s enthusiasm for the storytelling got out of hand. *“‘Look, Bumper,”’ I said. ‘‘I want to help, but I have to be sure. There’s a couple of more things I need to check out. Like it or not, you’ll have to wait three or four more days.”’ None of them looked very happy at that. I thought for a moment that Christy was going to argue with me, but she remembered the marching orders she had from Auerbauch. Wilai and Somsuk started chattering back and forth in Thai. They were talking fast, using lots of slang, plus some plays on words. It was obvious that Bumper, for all his claimed expertise in the language, couldn’t follow the conversation. The two Thai gentlemen had

probably learned that a long time ago. Their mistake was they thought no other American in the room could understand them either. For a military man, Somsuk didn’t know much about security. One rule is that you never,

ever,

discuss classified

information

in public,

even when you’re speaking a language no one else is supposed to understand.

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I bit the inside of my cheek hard, to stop the laugh trying to burst out of me. I hadn’t expected they would make it so easy for me. I was about ready to expose the game right there, but I saw Christy’s face first. It had the same glow that was hanging on Bumper’s mug. It was going to take more than what I had just overheard to convince them Wilai was a fraud. Somsuk would swear I had misunderstood the Thai. So I sat there waiting. I knew what Somsuk was going to say in English, but I managed to still look interested and a bit surprised. ‘*Major Butz, Khun Wilai must have an answer soon,”’ Somsuk announced. ‘‘We can understand the concerns of these people, but the time comes for decisions. Khun Wilai is going back into Laos in two days. He will take the risk of talking to people in the camp and see if he can find out the exact date of the transfer. He will be back on Sunday. We will have to have the answer then, and we will have to have the money.”’ Bumper hadn't said anything for a while. He was too busy balancing the pros and cons of murdering me on the spot. He must have decided that killing me would kill the chances of Auerbauch’s $3 million, because when he exploded, it was verbal, not physical. ‘‘Morgan, you shit, what the fuck are you trying to prove?’ he started, forgetting the lady present. ‘‘You heard the man. We only have a few more days, then it’s too late. Auerbauch’s got a head full of shit, letting a fucking beach bum make a decision like this for him. He must not give a goddamn about that grandson. I do, only I can’t do anything about it without that money.’’

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The only smart thing to do was get out of there. Butz was the kind of person you want to say no to over the telephone, unless you’re holding a two-by-four in your hand when you do it. *“*Look, Major,’’ I argued, keeping my voice low and calm, calling him by his title instead of his name, ‘‘I need a few more days. That’s what Auerbauch

wants,

that’s what you’ll have to settle for.”’ *‘Okay, Morgan, I don’t have any choice. Take’ the goddamn time. But I promise you, when we get to the prison camp, if we find the prisoners are already gone by a couple of days, I’m going to come back and open you up a new place to fuck yourself.’’. Bumper insisted on tying the blindfolds back on before we left. He did it the right way and I couldn’t see a thing as I stumbled out the door in front of my guide. Somebody had to help me get my shoes back on before we got in the car. The driver stopped before we got back on Phaholyotin Road and told us to take the blindfolds off. He was smarter than either Butz or Wilai. He knew driving around Bangkok with two farangs in the back seat wearing blindfolds was a sure way to get some police attention. When we both could see again, he drove us as far as the Victory Monument circle, let us out, and told us to get our own cab. That was fine with me. Most of the Bangkok taxis are air conditioned,

so we

wouldn’t

have to breathe

exhaust fumes on the way back to the hotel. Christy didn’t say much on the way back; she just sat there pissed at the way I had reacted to Wilai’s story. I

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tried a couple of times to tell her why I had my doubts. Each time she took immediate exception, challenging me to prove the story false. With her mind made up, it wouldn’t have done any good to tell her what I had overheard them say in Thai. Wilai and Somsuk hadn’t exactly confessed to a fraud while I was listening. They had said some things that convinced me that was exactly what they were pulling, but they had been talking in a private code, using slang and double meanings. If I had given Christy the exact translation, she would have taken it as proof that she was right and I was a cynical bastard too dumb to see sincerity. She was like a lot of other people. She wanted to believe there were men still out there alive, men that could be rescued. She didn’t want to hear anything that suggested differently. I wasn’t going to convince her otherwise, and anyway, I didn’t have to. I worked for Auerbauch. He had hired me to tell him what I thought. Before I did that, I wanted to tighten a couple of more screws. And I still had to explain where they found Abe’s things. It was almost noon when we got back to the hotel. We stopped at the desk and I collected all the messages that Christy had left the night before plus one from Steve Austin, who asked me to call. I used a phone sitting on the reception desk, telling the clerk who tried to stop me to charge it to my room. I caught Steve beforehe had gone out for lunch. He told me that he had found the file on Wilai-and con-

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firmed it was the same man. That I knew, but he had also found an address in the file. *‘It’s out on New Phetburi Road,’ he said. ‘‘It’s old information, but you might want to check it out. Maybe he’s still there.”’ I pulled out the little notebook I always carry and copied it down, along with the name of the company Wilai was using the last time he had tried to sell a deal to Uncle Sam. That done, I thanked Steve and told him to keep in touch. I had several other people I wanted to check with in the afternoon, so I told Christy I would see her later. She didn’t like that; she wanted to go with me. I didn’t want her along. I knew she wouldn’t understand why she wasn’t going with me, but I was back in control and I work alone. That’s the way I have always worked, and I wasn’t going to change my style just because she was a pretty woman that I badly wanted to fuck. I made her mad, but that’s what I expected. I even enjoyed the fight that followed. ‘*Do you know what I think?’’ she asked, and went on to answer her own question. ‘‘I don’t think there is anything else you can find out. I think you want to delay it for a couple of more days so you can justify the money Auerbauch is paying you. You haven’t found out a thing that I couldn’t have done myself. Butz and his Thai friends are telling the truth, and we ought to tell Bue seh that so they can get on with the operation.”’ ‘‘Look,’’ I said, ‘‘you feel that way, that gives you

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something to do this afternoon. It’s 9:00 P.M. yesterday in Seattle. Call Auerbauch and tell him that. Only when he asks what my recommendation is, tell him I recommend no go, at least for now. With any luck, you can tell me I’m fired when I get back this afternoon.”’ I left her standing there, still pouting. Gullible people make me mad. It’s bad enough when a dunce like Butz gets taken in by the Wilais of the world. But Christy was too damned smart to bite into a hook baited with a Chinese fairy tale. It would be a painful time for her when she discovered for herself that’s what it was.

VI.

I spent the afternoon visiting several of my usual contacts, more working-level government officials, a few people in business I’ve done favors for, a couple of retired American Gls who own bars and deal in information when it pays, and two guys I know who don’t answer questions about how they make a living. Some of them knew about Wilai, or had heard rumors about Bumper Butz’s latest endeavor, but nobody had anything to add to what I already knew. I was convinced that there was fraud and the guilty party included Wilai and his friend Somsuk. The little fart would already have his bank account someplace where they permit secret numbers and he was waiting to get his hands on some of the $3 million Bumper was trying to get out of J. J. before he disappeared. The question mark was the collection of personal 89

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effects. How had Wilai gotten his hands on them? His story of trading into Laos didn’t wash. Wilai wasn’t the type to take those kinds of risks. So where had Wilai found the effects? Somebody had been keeping them all these years, but who? Why had they suddenly surfaced? If I could answer those questions, I would have it solved. I gave up for the day and headed back to the hotel about six o’clock. I picked my key up at the desk, then wandered around the hotel a bit. I didn’t have anything else to do, and I didn’t want to go up to an empty room. The hotel had a big sunken bar in the lobby with a small musical group, and while it wasn’t exactly my kind of music they were playing on the violins, I decided a drink might make it sound a bit like country and western. I guess I have to admit that I was looking for her, but I almost missed her as I walked through the bar searching for a place to sit down. She was sitting a bit behind a support piilar, sipping a brandy out of a giant-size snifter and looking dangerous. Her hair was still up in the bun, but several strands had come loose. I was off to the side and she still hadn’t seen me. If I had thought about the glare on her face, I would have quietly turned around and walked out. Instead, I went looking for trouble. **Hi!’’. Isaid. ‘‘Am I fired?’’ She threw me a look that hit like a goal-line play. It was too late to run, so I sat down across from her.

‘‘No, you’re not fired,’’ she said. ‘‘I quit.’ ‘You quit, for real?’’

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‘*That’s the only way you can do it,”’ she said. ‘‘The hotel travel desk is trying to get me reservations back.”’ **So you really did call the old man?’’ ‘“You knew I would,’’ she growled at me, ‘‘and you knew he’d take your side.”’ **So,”’ I said, ‘why quit your job over it?’’ She picked up the brandy glass and emptied it, then waved to a waitress to bring her another. If she was drinking fast to calm herself down, it wasn’t working. “‘Damn you men,’’ she whispered. ‘‘Damn all of you. ‘“What’s that got to do with Abe Auerbauch?’’ I asked. **Look, Mr. Adams,”’ she said, dressing my name up in a ruffled shirt and black bow tie, ‘‘I’ve worked for that old man for three years. I’ve worked hard and I’ve done a good job. I’ve proved I have good judgment, time and again, better than the male clowns he’s surrounded himself with. I thought I had his respect and trust. Now I know better.”’ ‘“You mean because he won’t take your advice on this?’’ I asked. “Of course that’s what I mean. The first time that something important—a real life-and-death issue—comes up, he tells me that I don’t know what I’m talking about and believes some man he’s spent less than thirty minutes with. Ail I am is one more brainless broad, nice to have around if you want to fuck or have kids, but not much good for anything else except the view.”’ ‘*You think that’s what it is?’’ I asked. ‘*That I won 39

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the day because I’m a man in a man’s world, and who would believe a woman?”’ ‘‘Of course,’’ she said as the drink girl walked up with her order and knelt Thai style by the table to serve the brandy. The waitress asked what I wanted, but I waved her off. I only drink for fun, not competition. I wasn’t welcome and it was time to go, but one thing needed saying. “If this whole thing comes down to men versus

women, can you explain something?”’ ‘‘What?’’ she asked, looking up like she wished I had already walked away. ‘*You’re not the only person who thinks Wilai’s story is true,’’ I said. “‘Bumper Butz thinks it’s true, too. Bumper’s a man. He’s the kind of man who ought to appeal to someone like J. J. Auerbauch. He’s brave, patriotic, loyal, well groomed, not a ‘goddamn hippy’ like I am. You sure as hell can’t argue that J. J. picks between the two of us on the basis of sex. What makes you think he’s doing the same between you and me?’’» A new look slid onto her face that had as much pain as the old one, but a lot more thought. She had been scored on and she knew it. It took her a while to digest

my suggestion. “Maybe you're right,’’

. she confessed when she got around to saying something, ‘‘but I still don’t understand. Why doesn’t he believe Major Butz? Why doesn’t he accept our conclusions instead of yours?’’ 9

“‘Christy,’’ I said, “‘that’s a question you have to answer yourself.’’ Then I held out my hand. Her re-

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sponse was automatic as she raised her-own hand to grasp mine. “‘If you’ve quit, I guess I’ll have to deal directly with Auerbauch, unless he wants to bring Landgrebe in on this. It’s been nice knowing you, it really has.”’ It had also been frustrating, but, what the hell, if you don’t try, you never get any. I turned around and started walking away. **Morgan,’’ she called as I got about fifteen feet away. I stopped and turned around. ‘*That’s what he said, too.”’ *“Who?’’ I asked. ‘J. J.,~ she answered. “‘I asked J. J. why he didn’t accept my advice, why he insisted on taking yours. He told me that’s a question I had to answer myself.”’ I walked out of the lobby bar intending to head for the nearest night spot. First I went up to my room to use the bathroom and change into a different shirt. Then I got interested in the day’s offering on the movie channel. I got hungry and room service sounded like a better deal than a coffee shop. I never did get out of the room. I even got to bed early. I woke up several times during the night dreaming about sandy-colored hair and hazelgreen eyes. I didn’t see Christy in the coffee shop the next morning or anyplace else around the hotel. It was time to visit a snake pit. About 9:30, I grabbed

a cab and gave the driver the New number I had for Wilai.

Phetburi Road

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The name New Phetburi Road carries a truckload of memories for a lot of ex-Gls. Back in the Vietnam years, it was the R and R strip—two miles of bars, hotels, restaurants, massage parlors, and girls, every which way you looked. Every time I ride along the street I remember 1968, watching hundreds of American men mobbing the area, dodging cars and taxis as they ran from bar to bar, trying to find the perfect girl for the night. Most of them succeeded. They wouldn’t recognize New Phetburi Road these days. The massage parlors and hotels are still there, if you look for them. But Thai Heaven, the Las Vegas, the Miami, the Hollywood, the Green Dragon, and all the rest of the girly bars have been swallowed up by new buildings that house computer companies, business centers, gas stations, supermarkets, and everything else you find in a city with a boom economy. The road itself has changed, turned into a major artery that feeds a day-long traffic jam into and out of suburbs that were rice paddies when the Gls thought Bangkok was the pussy capital of the world. The address I had for Wilai’s business wasn’t in one of the new buildings. It was in a row of dilapidated, three-story, Chinese-style shops, places with small retail operations on the ground floor, and the owner and

his family living in the upper two stories. The number that Steve had given me sat between a hardware store and a noodle shop. The front was just wide enough for a plate-glass window and a door. The window was cloudy with dust and the grime from too much diesel smoke from passing

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buses. Gold lettering peeked through the dirt to announce in English and Thai that this was the Thai Mineral Survey and Development Company, Ltd. There were a couple of names listed as president and director. They weren’t Wilai Phaksabai, but that didn’t discourage me from going in and asking questions. The front door opened into an office where a low counter separated the public from a couple of well-worn wooden desks, a file cabinet, and a bored young man in a worn white shirt, a food-spotted tie, and a pair of badly cut pants. The way he dangled the cigarette from the corner of his mouth suggested he wanted to look tough. He didn’t pull it off, because he had a little mole on his chin with six or seven thick hairs growing out of it. He must have been as proud of those seven mole hairs as he was of the cigarette butt, because he had never cut them. They straggled down trying to reach his chest. He sat back on a chair behind one of the desks reading a Thai publisher’s attempt to answer the challenge of Playboy and Penthouse. He took his time getting up and walking over to the counter. Once there, he made a garbled attempt at the English language. The only thing I could understand was good afternoon, which didn’t go all that well with the morning sun fighting through the dirty windows. Not speaking Thai had worked so well at Bumper’s house, I thought I had better keep the advantage, so we kept practicing English. ‘Does

Mr.

Wilai

Phaksabai

work

here?’’

I asked,

going slow, pronouncing each word like it was a sepa-

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rate sentence. ‘‘I want to talk to Mr. Wilai. Very important, worth very much money.”’ His face broke out in smiles, and I knew I had a strike on the line. Wilai’s name might not be on the door, but my friend knew who he was. ‘*Please wait. Please wait,’’ he told me, then turned . around and grabbed a telephone. He only dialed three numbers, so it was an inside line. It took a while for somebody to pick up the other end. He jabbered in Thai, describing me and reporting that I wanted to see the man he was talking to. The smile started to melt when he finished his recitation. It dissolved into surprise, then shock, then fear. The Thai language equivalent of ‘‘yes, sir’ started dropping from his mouth like spit off a bulldog’s lips. He hung up and walked back over to where I stood. *“No Mr. Wilai here. No Mr. Wilai work here. Please go.’’ He tried following the orders he had been given over the phone. “You tell Mr. Wilai, he comes down and talks to me or he doesn’t get any money.”’ I tried that three times, but nothing happened. The hell with it. I shoved through the low swinging door and started for the stairs I could see at the back of the room. The student thug damn near shit his pants trying to get in front of me before I started up the stairs.

‘“‘No, no,’’ he shouted. ‘‘No go up. You wait here.”’ He left me standing there, went back to the phone, and dialed again. This time he showed a bit more guts. He told the person that answered I insisted on seeing the boss, that there was money involved, and since he

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didn’t have a gun to shoot me, he couldn’t stop me going up the stairs. He said that last part in an accusing tone, like they hadn’t let him carry the kind of weaponry he thought his responsibilities demanded. ‘“You wait here. Khun Wilai come soon,’’ he told me once he hung up the phone. I pulled out the chair behind the second desk and sat down. Five minutes later, Wilai came down the stairs, followed by the ever-faithful Captain Somsuk. **Khun. Morgan. It’s good to see you again,’’ Wilai said with a smile pasted on his face. ‘‘Maijaa Put tell you where find us?’ I told him I hadn’t talked to Major Butz since the time we spent together, that I didn’t know where Butz was, bui that everybody knew where Wilai’s office was. Then I told him I had a whole bunch of questions the man with the money wanted asked, questions that had to be answered before any money exchanged hands. I suggested that maybe I didn’t trust Bumper, hoping to sow a bit of suspicion in the ranks. “*Khun Wilai,’’ I went on, stopping every so often to let Somsuk translate what Wilai didn’t get. ‘“You must understand, Mr. Auerbauch wants his grandson back, but he wants to be sure he gets what he pays for. That’s why I need more evidence, pictures, anything.”’ I tried the good-guy/bad-guy approach, painting Auerbauch as a mean bastard who really didn’t care. I raised my own objections at his objections, suggesting how Auerbauch’s things might have showed up in different ways. They both hung in there, defending their story, even

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when I caught them in contradictions and inconsistencies. They weren’t smart, but they were stubborn. The subtle approach wasn’t working, so I went the direct route. ‘‘Look,’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t believe your story. I don’t know where you got hold of Auerbauch’s personal effects, but I don’t think you’ve ever been in Laos. So kiss the DRRnS money he bye unless you produce more proof.”’ A very pained Somsuk turned and started translating that for Wilai’s benefit. I stopped him and repeated it all, every word in my best Thai. I left them standing there, their mouths open like flytraps as I walked out the door. They knew the enemy. I was looking forward to seeing what they would do now. Out in front, I was feeling mean enough to argue over the fare back to the Dusitani with the taxi driver I waved down. He started out asking triple what it should have been, and we both got a bit vocal before we settled on a price. I climbed in and we took off. New Phetburi Road these days has a concrete traffic divider down the middle, so we had to go a good mile or so before the taxi could turn around and head back

toward the middle of town. The little Datsuns that make up most of Bangkok’s taxi fleet don’t have much room in the back seat for legs as long as mine. I usually sit crossways, stretching my bones across the transmission hump. That means I look out the side and the back windows as much as the front. I was looking directly at Wilai’s place when we drove past in the slow traffic.

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Even then I wouldn’t have noticed anything, except that the guy crossing the street had to climb over the waist-high barrier in the middle of the road. It was Wilai’s junior hoodlum with the long hairs on his chin. He flagged down a cab, then did another funny thing. He jumped right in without bargaining. The traffic speeded up again, and my driver turned left toward Sukumvit Road. When we slowed down for the next turn, the cab with my new friend pulled up right beside us. He didn’t wave hello at me. Instead he put a lot of effort in looking in the another direction. I had a tail. I watched the other cab follow me all the way back to the Dusitani. It was about noon and I was hungry, so I went for a walk, looking for a cheaper place to eat than the hotel restaurants. Along the way I played all the little games you read about in spy novels, stopping to look in windows, suddenly turning around and walking in the other direction, crossing back and forth across the street _ in the middle of the block, that sort of thing. He must not have read the same spy novels, because I caught him flatfooted every time. It was funny. He didn’t realize I was playing games. I would have had to ‘walk up and shake hands before he tumbled on the fact that I knew I had a tail. I walked into an open-air restaurant with baked ducks hanging in the window and ordered a dish of duck and red pork and a beer for lunch. My friend hung around

the outside. I am not a private detective. I never wanted to be one. Most of the time, detectives lead deadly dull lives

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spent sitting in cars, following people around town, pounding pavements and listening to tapped telephones. They are underpaid, and they usually get less adventure in a year than I can get in a weekend in Hong Kong or Singapore. They can be useful, and I have the names of at least one agency in every country I work in. In Thailand I deal with Boonma Security and Investigations. During the war years, Boonma worked for U.S. military intelligence helping investigate PX diversions, AWOLs, and the backgrounds of Thai ladies marrying American soldiers. When the Thai government kicked Uncle Sam out in 1975, Boonma started the first detective agency in the country. If Wilai was putting an amateur on me, I’d put a professional on him. I left the restaurant, walked back to the hotel, and called Boonma on the phone in my room. *“You understand what I want?’’ I asked after we had talked for a while. *“You want these characters Wilai and Somsuk followed, even if they go out of town.”’ “‘Especially if they go out of town,’’ I emphasized. ‘Run a general background check on Wilai while you’re at it. Find out how he’s been feeding himself.”’ With that chore done, I got to thinking about what to do next. My visit to Wilai’s office was turning up the

heat on the pot. The best thing to do was let it bubble for a couple of days while Boonma watched who was throwing in the spices. It was as good a time as any to pop down to my bungalow, check the Telex machine, and get a new change of clothes.

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I called the local Hertz agency and asked them to send a car over with the rental papers. I figured out years ago that when you live my kind of life it’s cheaper to rent the damn things when you need them rather than buy them and let them sit parked. While I was packing, I got thinking about Christy. If she had any luck with her reservations, she would be on her way back home by now. I almost missed listening to her complaints about my taking off a couple of days while poor Abe Auerbauch rotted in a Lao prison. When I finished throwing things into my suitcase, I picked up the copy of the Bangkok Post that had been shoved under my door that morning, and sat down to

skim the news while I waited for them to bring the car around. Three minutes later, somebody pounded on the door. I walked over and opened it, wondering if maybe Bumper was looking for me, or if my tail was checking up to make sure I hadn’t snuck out while he wasn’t looking. It was the one person [ didn’t expect—Christy Hammond. She was standing there looking half ready to run, half hoping I would invite her in. She looked tired and her hair was down, hanging below her shoulders, just like I knew it would. It made her look younger, not more than twenty-five, and easy to start liking again. ‘‘Morgan, I can’t get reservations out of Bangkok until the day after tomorrow,’’ she explained. Still standing there, she asked, ‘‘Can I come in?’’ “*Sure,’’ I said, waving her past me and into one of the two chairs the room had. I asked if she wanted something to drink. When she said yes, I opened a

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small bottle of Scotch that was sitting among a collection waiting for the tired guest to get thirsty. I pulled out a bottle of soda water and some ice from the refrigerator they put in all the Dusitani rooms and made us each a Scotch and soda. I handed Christy hers and sat down in the other chair. ‘‘Morgan,”’ she said after taking a long gulp of the drink. ‘‘I’ve done a lot of thinking trying to answer the question I asked last night. I still don’t have the answer, but I think I know where I got off the track.”’ ‘*You mean you realize now that Wilai’s a fraud?’’ ‘‘No, I still think he’s telling the truth. I still think J. J.’s grandson is out there. What I do admit now is that you really believe Wilai’s a fraud, and that you must have some good reasons for thinking that. Before I thought you had to be playing some kind of vicious game, either to put me down, or take more money from J. J., something like that.”’ She took another drink from the glass, still looking miserable. Then she put the glass on an end table by the chair and looked at me, trying a smile on for size.

‘‘Morgan, there is no reason you should do it, but I would like you to tell me why you think he’s a fraud.’’ She stopped talking for a few seconds. When I didn’t say anything she added, ‘‘It’s important to me to hear what you think.”’ Every man likes to play teacher, especially with a beautiful woman. I figured she was ready for lesson one in intelligence-source analysis and verification. That’s what the pros call it. ‘‘Christy,’’ I began,

‘‘anytime someone

provides a

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piece of information, there are a number of things you have to think about before you act on the information. ‘‘The first thing is why is the person giving you the information. In Wilai’s case, someone is going to hand him a lot of money if we act on his story. That’s the first warning. **The next thing you look at is the source itself. Has he told the truth in the past, or have you caught him in lies before?’’ I told her everything I knew about Wilai’s past history. She asked a couple of questions along the way, getting more comfortable as we talked. ‘*Even liars tell the truth sometimes,’’ I continued, **so you want corroborating evidence. Wilai’s got Abe Auerbauch’s personal effects, but that’s all. The evidence is thirteen years old, and there is no other evidence to prove that Wilai has even been in Laos since it went Communist. ‘**Another thing you look for is internal inconsistencies.’’ I told her about my visit to Wilai’s office and the . questions | had asked. ‘“Wilai’s gotten pretty good over the years,’’ I continued, ‘“‘so it’s hard to find the contradictions, but they’re there. For example, yesterday he talked about the heavy rain the first day he saw the prison camp. This morning, I asked what month of the year it was when he first saw the camp, and he said March. It never rains in March in this part of the world. ‘*Finally, you look for evidence that proves the opposite to what your source is claiming. Sometimes that can be a matter of luck.’’ I told her about Wilai and Somsuk’s conversation in Thai.

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‘‘My God!’’ she gasped: ‘‘You mean they talked right in front of us about pulling off a fraud?’’ ‘‘Not exactly,’’ I confessed, ‘“‘but it was almost that good. Somsuk suggested they shouldn’t push too hard, that they had you and Butz convinced, and if they gave it a couple of days, you’d convince me, too. Then Wilai mentioned he had to go to Mai Sai up on the border for business. He suggested Somsuk tell us he would be going into Laos during that time.’’ ‘‘That doesn’t sound like an admission of fraud to me,’’ Christy said.

‘I know,’’ I answered. ‘‘It was more the way they said things, rather than what they said, except for one thing.”’ **What was that?’’ ‘*Mai Sai is on the border. But it’s on the border with Burma, not with Laos. A good part of the Golden Triangle heroin moves through there, but I have never heard of anyone launching a rescue operation into Laos through Burma. Wilai may be dealing dope; I don’t think he’s dealing MIAs.”’ ‘‘Damn it, Morgan,’’ she blurted, “‘why didn’t you tell me all this before?”’ ‘‘Christy,’’ I answered, ‘‘my number-one rule is never argue with fools, even pretty ones. You didn’t want to listen yesterday; today you’ve stopped being foolish.’’ ‘‘T don’t know whether I’m supposed to thank you or curse you,”’ she said, shaking her head a bit. ‘‘If you’re so damn sure Wilai’s a fraud, why don’t you tell Auerbauch that? Why are you still looking for something?”’

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‘I’m 80 percent sure. That’s a great percentage if you're using a weather forecast to decide whether or not to go on a picnic. It’s not good enough for this.’’ ‘*So what happens if you can’t find anything else?’’ “‘T don’t know what Auerbauch will do, but I have a sixteen-year-old son. I don’t get to see him as often as I would like, and there was a time when his mother and I first broke up that I didn’t see him at all. I know what I would do if it was him out there, and I had all the

information I have right now and $3 million to spend.”’ **What?’’ she asked. ‘ld give the money to Bumper and tell him to take his best shot.”’ She looked stunned for a moment. “‘Now I am confused. Are you saying Auerbauch should go with it or not?”’ ‘‘Neither. I’m saying I want some more time. I’m hoping something will break that will give me better

proof.”’ -

| went on and told her about the tail, the detective

agency, and about my plans to drop down to Pattaya for a couple of days. ‘‘T’ve tightened the cinch on Wilai. Now I want to let him think I’m goofing off. With any luck, he’ll do something stupid again.”’ She didn’t give me a lecture on why I shouldn’t goof off. Maybe she figured it wasn’t her job now that she had quit Auerbauch’s employment. Instead she did just what I had hoped she would do. She agreed to my suggestion that she take advantage of the lack of air-

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plane space and make the trip to Pattaya with me. But she wouldn’t accept my invitation to stay in the guest bedroom of my bungalow. She insisted I find her a nice hotel instead.

Vil.

The Hertz man called from the lobby and I went down to take delivery of the rental car while Christy went back to her room to pack for the trip to Pattaya. I met the rental man at the desk. On our way to the parking lot, we passed my tail standing in the corner of the lobby trying to act interested in the display case of one of the jewelry shops. He followed us outside, then realized he wasn’t supposed to stand there watching us in plain view. That left him with nothing to do but walk past us toward Silom Road. About fifteen yards farther on, he spun around, pretending he had forgotten something, and started back toward the hotel. When he got back to where we were standing, I told the rental agent in as loud a voice as possible that I was going to drive to Pattaya for a couple of days. I got a strange look from the agent, who already 107

=

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knew that, but my stupid friend also heard the comment, because he suddenly took off at a run. The rental agreements signed and the car keys in my pocket, I was back in the room for only about six minutes when the phone rang. ‘*All ready to go?’’ I asked, expecting Christy to be on the other end. ‘‘What the shit are you trying to pull off??? Bumper Butz’s voice roared at me. ‘‘I’m going to come over and cut your balls off. You had no fucking business bugging Wilai. He says you threaten this operation once more and he’s out.”’ It was nice to know I had gotten to Bumper. The more | stirred things up, the more likely Wilai would do something stupid. I gave the stick in the pudding another whip. ‘‘Get off it,’’ I told Bumper. “‘I’m doing what I’m being paid to do. Unless you and Wilai come up with something better than what I’ve seen so far, I'll recommend against the raid.”’ ‘You can kiss your ass good-bye, you son of a bitch. You're a security threat to a military operation. I’m not going to let you wreck it. I'll do what has to be done to protect it.’” He hung up. Just as I was hanging my phone back on the hook, Christy knocked on the door. ‘‘Hi, the phone was busy. I’m ready to go.’’ She realized something was wrong. ‘‘What’s the matter? Who was on the phone?’’ ‘Your friend Bumper Butz just threatened to kill me.”’ ‘‘My God! Are you serious?’’ she asked.

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‘‘T want to know if he’s serious. Let’s hope he’s just mad.’’ I didn’t think Bumper would really try anything; he was blowing smoke. But I decided to spend a bit more time watching for things traveling in my wake, just in case. She’d already called for a bellboy to carry her bags and I was packed light. We walked to the elevator, rode

it down, and checked out. She waited by the door while I walked down the ramp, got the Toyota, and drove up to the entrance so we could put the bags in the back. I looked around. My tail had disappeared. I wondered if he was trying to hire a car, too, or making a call to Wilai. We pulled out of the Dusitani at 3:30, beating the evening rush hour. It took ten minutes to drive to the Rama IV entrance to the toll freeway, a new but welcome crosstown route which has brought Bangkok that much closer to an Asian replica of Los Angeles. I paid my ten baht at the toll booth and we were on our way. ‘‘How long does it take to get there?’’ she asked about the time we left the freeway and hit the double highway. ‘It’s about eighty miles. That’s an hour and a half if we push it. Two hours if we enjoy the view.”’ “*Let’s enjoy the view,”’ she said as she settled back in the seat to take a look at the Thai countryside. Even in March when the paddies lie fallow, it’s a nice drive. The road crosses over a dozen little canals, and one river along the way passes through rice farmland, tapioca fields, and white flats where farmers rake up giant piles of salt won by the patient wait for sea

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water to evaporate. I like to drive, so I don’t talk much when I’m doing it. I turned the car FM radio on to a station that broadcasts western music, pushed the airconditioning lever up high, and took a glance every chance I could in her direction. I found the view inside the car a hell of a lot more interesting than the one along the roadside. I had been taking my time driving, slowing down whenever she asked a question about the countryside so she could get a good look at the temple, factory, or whatever that had attracted her attention. Still, they must have been driving like crazy to catch up with us, faster than they should have been pushing a twenty-yearold car. They almost didn’t see us when they passed, and I hadn’t recognized the beat-up green Mercedes in the rear-view mirror. I had been trying to sneak looks at Christy’s knees where her skirt was starting to creep up, so she saw them first, just before they pulled back into the curb lane in front of me. ‘*Morgan, that’s the car that took us to Butz’s house.”’ ‘“*You’re right,’’ I said. *‘I sort of expected them.”’ ‘*You mean they’re following us? Doesn’t that worry you after what Butz threatened?”’ It did, but I decided not to admit it to her. ‘‘Hell,’’ I told her, “‘I practically invited them. I would just as soon they. think we weren’t dangerous, so let’s convince him that we’re goof-offs.”’ Two hours after we left Bangkok, I took the right turn that leads straight to the beach and Pattaya. Pattaya

combines a little of Acapulco and Waikiki, with more

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than a bit of Tijuana and a lot of Thailand. It’s got surprises for every taste, including the U.S. Pacific fleet that’s made it their favorite liberty port in Southeast Asia. Fortunately, the navy wasn’t in town, and by March most of the European snowbirds have gone back home. I checked Christy into the Merlin after trying once more to convince her to stay with me and promised I would pick her up at 7:30 for dinner. The Merlin has two entrances, and I used the one I didn’t come in, hoping I’d lose the tickbirds in the green Mercedes. | didn’t mind them following me around Pattaya, but I didn’t see any reason to let them know where the bungalow was. I wasn’t worried about Christy. I was the one making trouble, and anyway, the hotel security system wouldn’t let them get near her floor. Once out of the hotel lot, I drove toward the fishing village of Na

Klua,

which

marks

the north

end

of

Pattaya. My maneuver at the hotel had worked, because . I couldn’t see any traffic behind me as I drove along the dirt road that leads from the main drag into the area where I live when I’m in Thailand. The bungalow is in the one part of Pattaya where you can rent a place right on the beach instead of having to risk life and limb crossing a busy street to get to the water. It took me a long time to find what I wanted, and almost as long to convince the owner to give me a long-term lease. The only thing between me and the beach is a small picket fence. There’s a living room with well-worn rattan furniture, a kitchen, and two bedrooms, each with their own bath. I air condition-one

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bedroom, not for me, but for the personal computer and the Telex machine I keep in that room. There was a pile of paper pumped out in front of the Telex. I read through a collection of messages from my brokers, offers of contract for my special kind of services, and a short line from my daughter, Cinda, who uses the Telex machine in the accounting firm where she works to keep in touch with good old dad. I typed out the answers that required immediate responses, a three-liner to Auerbauch telling him where I could be reached for a couple of days, and four paragraphs to Cinda. I took a quick shower, changed into fresh clothes that came out of a drawer instead of a suitcase, and left a note in my jaggedly written Thai for my cook and laundress, Ari, who always manages to be someplace else every time I arrive back from out of town. I told her to lay in a supply of fresh food, and to be around the next day in case I needed her to cook something. Back at the Merlin, I pulled into a spot next to the familiar, faded green Mercedes. I couldn’t see either of the men who had been with us at Butz’s. They were probably hiding in the bushes someplace. I called Christy on the house phone. She came down immediately. ‘‘Let’s walk around a bit,’’ I said, “‘before we eat.’’ ‘*Great,’’ she answered. “‘I’ve always wondered about this place. My little brother had a shore leave here one time, and he’s been talking about it ever since. Every time I try to get any details about what he liked so much, he goes vague on me.”’ We walked along the beach side of the road down to

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the South Pattaya Strip, a street full of jewelry stores, tailor shops, portrait artists who will work from a photograph, restaurants, and outside bars where girls sit on stools hoping for someone to come along with an offer of a drink and companionship. As usual, the street was crowded with Thai, Indians, Europeans, Arabs, an occasional American, and lots of Chinese from Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. ‘This has got to be the most cosmopolitan beach resort in the world,’’ Christy said at one point. ‘‘But it's so ... honky-tonk. That’s the word, isn’t it? Honky-tonk.”’ **That’s South Pattaya,’’ I said. ‘‘Come on, there’s a

couple of open-air seafood restaurants down at the end of the street.”’ As we pushed our way through the crowd, we’d get a glimpse once in a while of our tails, the chauffeur working one side from behind us, the other man trying to keep in front of us on the other side of the street. _ They weren’t any better at the spy business than the kid with the hairy mole. We deliberately lost them, moving down a side street. We ducked into a department store and slipped out a second door. We did it for fun and the laugh, and wondered if they would eon to Wilai that they had lost us in the crowd. We went into Foodville, which sounds and looks like a supermarket, but it’s a restaurant. Inside, I steered Christy to some long tables covered with ice and every type of seafood imaginable. ‘‘That’s the menu,’’ I told her. “‘You get what you point to.”’

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We picked out a Phuket lobster, some shrimp, mussels, and a red snapper. I explained to the waiter in great detail exactly how I wanted each thing cooked, and told him to take us to one of the tables on the veranda overlooking Pattaya Bay. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said as she looked out at the small boats floating in the bay under the moonlight. “‘I understand why you like it. Is your house near here?’’ I told her a bit about the place and suggested she let my cook fix dinner the next evening. ‘Don’t worry, I'll get you back to the hotel in plenty of time for a good night’s rest,’’ I toid her, knowing damned well that was the last thing I would want to do. *‘What about tomorrow during the day?’’ she asked. ‘“Do we lie around on the beach while those two idiots we've picked up stare at us, or what?” “‘T thought I’d go fishing and maybe do a little skin diving. Like to come along?”’ ‘That sounds great. Do we go out in a boat?”’ I said that’s exactly what we’d do just as they started to serve the food. It was a fun evening. We only talked about business once. That was right at the start when I told her I was sorry she had quit her job because of me. “‘It wasn’t just because of you,’’ she said. “‘It’s been a long time coming. I wonder why I’ve stayed around so long. It’s hard working for somebody you don’t like.”’ ; “‘T can see why you wouldn’t like that little bastard,”’ I said. ‘‘He strikes me as a typical Caesar complex,

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the kind of person anybody over six feet tall wants to avoid.”’ **That’s him,’’ Christy said. ‘‘He started out with nothing and made six fortunes, not for the money but to show he could do it. He respects nothing but strength and power and he has total contempt for most of the people who work for him.”’ **So why did you put up with it for so long?’’ **Money,”’ she answered, ‘‘and don’t look at me that way. Anyway, I didn’t have as bad a time as the men do. He doesn’t consider women any kind of a threat, and he fancies himself something of an old-school gentleman.”’ **Sounds like a case study,’’ I threw in, not really caring one way or another, but willing to listen if she

‘wanted to talk about it. She went on. ‘‘He likes to own things, but only the very best. He’s got an art collection that would be world famous if he’d let anyone else see it. Two architecture magazines keep asking permission to run feature articles on his house, and his wife left a jewelry collection that makes Elizabeth Taylor jealous.’’ ‘*What did he do with that after she died?’’ I asked. ‘*He keeps it in a safe-deposit box. Once something belongs to him, it’s his forever. I wouldn’t be surprised _ if he’s made provisions to destroy everything he owns when he dies, now that he’s got no one to leave it to.”’ She caught the mistake and corrected it. ‘‘Unless Butz can get Abe out of that prison.”’ ‘*So what will you do now that you’ve quit?’’

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‘‘T don’t know, go back and find something else, I guess.”’ We finished the food first and sat there for another half hour, talking about nothing that mattered while we sipped the last of the wine. Now that she had joined the unemployed, she let me pay the bill without challenge. We walked back through South Pattaya, stopping at her suggestion in one of the go-go bars for a nightcap. There were at least thirty young Thai girls in the place and about half that many customers. The dim lights hid more flesh than the costumes. Ten of the girls were on a Stage or a table all the time, shaking ass and tits in time to the music. Those who weren’t dancing were casually hustling drinks, which was how the bar made money, and frantically hustling dates, which was how they made money. ‘I never knew sex for sale could be so casual,”’ Christy shouted across the small table, trying to make herself heard above the noise. “‘It’s not what I expected. I thought it would be terribly depressing, that the girls would act like sad clowns with happy faces painted on. It’s hard to believe prostitutes having fun selling themselves.”’ ‘‘They don’t think they’re prostitutes,’ I shouted back. ‘‘They reserve the right to make a choice. They only go with a guy if they like him.”’ ‘“They get paid, don’t they? That makes them prostitutes, doesn’t it?”’ ‘If you define it as selling your services for money, even if you like the job, that makes most of us prostitutes,

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doesn’t it? Why was it you said you kept working for Auerbauch?”’ She gave me one of those God-you’re-weird looks, so I dropped the subject. From there we headed back to the hotel. The moon was up, and we slipped off our shoes and walked along the beach. Things were going so well I thought I had a chance. By the time we were standing outside the door with her sticking the key in, I was half hard in anticipation. Only, when she got the door opened and turned around, her face was saying good-bye, not come in. I still tried for a kiss and connected for a couple of seconds. She broke it off before it could get interesting. **Morgan, please. Let’s say good night, then you pick me up in the morning.”’ **How about I come in and we talk for a while?’’ I asked, still hoping. ‘*Morgan, I’m tempted, and that’s what’s confusing. This is one problem I’d never expected to have on this trip. I never mix men and business.”’ ‘*T thought you quit,’’ I argued. “‘That’s not the only reason. It’s, well . . . I’m not into macho chauvinists, at least I wasn’t. Give me time, okay?”’ What the hell could J do? I may be what she called me, but I gave up trying to wrestle women into bed a long time ago. I told her that she was beautiful and turned around and walked toward the elevator. I didn’t hear the door close behind me and I hoped all the way down the hall she would call me back. She didn’t. Outside, Wilai’s spies were sitting in their car, one in

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the front and the other in the back. They must have been. almost asleep because they didn’t see me until after I started up my engine. I guess they figured I wouldn’t be down before breakfast. Maybe that’s why I got the cold shoulder at the door. She didn’t mind screwing a male chauvinist once in a while, but she didn’t want anybody knowing it had happened. It was easier thinking that than the possibility that she didn’t like me. It took me fifteen minutes to lose the two bastards in the Mercedes. I would have liked to have driven them off a cliff if I could have figured out how to do it. There I was, playing spy games when all I wanted was to snuggle up between a pair of long, white-skinned legs. I got up early the next morning, left my car parked beside the bungalow, hiked out to Pattaya Road, and caught a baht bus down to the beach strip. I carried along a sack with the basics for the day: towels, suntan lotion, a bottle of white wine to go with lunch, and two sets of snorkels and fins. There were dozens of big wooden Thai-style fishing “boats lined up along the beach, all waiting for tourists looking for rides out to the island in the bay. There’s one fellow I use all the time, and he saw me coming. I don’t know his name. Everyone calls him Uncle Mustache because of the long set of handlebars hanging on his lip. He’s got at least three wives, and more children than I’d want to count. He runs three or four fishing boats, using wives and half-grown kids to handle them all. I told him what I wanted to do for the day and we

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started bargaining price. I’ve used the man twenty-five times or so over the years. Every time he makes me bargain like it was the first time out. Every time I get him down at least two hundred baht lower than he wants to go. Every time the trip goes so well, I give what he lost in the bargaining back as a tip at the end of the day. Once we agreed on price, I threw him the bag, gave him some baht so he could pick up beer, bait, and ice, and told him I wanted him ready to pull anchor in forty-five minutes. Christy was waiting in the lobby, wearing a floppy cloth hat with big yellow flowers painted on it and a matching sun suit that did wonders for her figure. Her hair poured out from the hat down around her naked shoulders. She was carrying a beach bag that was part of the same set. The outfit looked new. She must have picked it up in one of the hotel shops right after she _checked in. “‘Come on,’’ I said. “‘Let’s get some breakfast in the coffee shop.”’ While we were ordering breakfast, I got a glimpse of our two new buddies, standing outside the coffee shop, trying to pretend they knew neither each other nor us. They both looked tired, like they had been up half the night looking for me. ‘‘We’re being followed again,’’ I told Christy. “It’s getting a bit heavy seeing them every time I turn around,’’ Christy told me. ‘‘I got up early, made a telephone call, and then went for a walk, and there they

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were. They’re getting pretty open about it all. Are we going to have to put up with this all day?’’ ‘‘T doubt it,’’ I said, ‘‘not where we’re going.’’ Then it hit me that she had just said something else. “‘Telephone call? Who were you calling?”’ ‘I called J. J. I had to. I was so positive the last time I talked to him that you were wrong and I was right. I had to set the record straight, tell him that you had valid reasons for doubting Bumper’s claims.’’ ‘*What did he say to that?’’ ‘*He did the thing that I got mad at him for not doing the last time we talked; he asked my advice.”’

‘“‘What did you tell him?’’ I asked. “‘T suppose just what you would have told him. You think the evidence suggests fraud, but if we don’t find more proof, he’ll have to make a decision as to whether or not it’s worth $3 million to find out for sure.”’ ““What’s the we?’’ I asked. “‘I thought you quit, or did you ask for your job back?”’ ‘| reminded him that I had quit when he started giving me orders like I was still on the payroll. He claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about, that he hadn’t seen any written notification. He accused me of using a situation where he was counting on me as a way of getting more pay. He said a 25 percent raise was the absolute most he could concede.’’ ‘““You mean you're still working for the old bastard, and with more money to boot?’’ ‘I guess so,’’ she muttered, avoiding my eyes. ‘‘At least I am until I send him a Telex or something.”’

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I almost offered her the use of my machine, but decided against it. Christy insisted on signing the check for breakfast, after which we walked down to the beach. Uncle Mustache had moved his boat from its usual parking place to a spot on the beach right in front of the hotel. The wife who was crewing for him was already digging the front anchor out of the sand when I followed Christy up the rungs of the iron ladder that hung from one side of the wooden hull. We stood under the awning over the front deck. Mustache started the diesel engine and threw the propeller into reverse as his wife hauled in the stern anchor. The two men we had left behind were running back and forth along the beach, shouting at each other, stopping every few yards to talk with one of the other boatmen still looking for customers for the day. ‘‘What do you think they’ll do?’’ Christy asked me with a laugh as our boat got into deep enough water for . Mustache to wheel it around and shove his gearbox into forward. ‘‘They may try to hire another boat, if they have enough money.”’ ‘*God, I hope they don’t.”’ “Don’t worry,’’ I assured her. ‘‘One of the reasons I use Mustache is his boat is a bit faster than most of the fest:*: ‘But can’t they just follow along and find us once we get wherever it is we’re going?”’ ‘*They’ll think we’re going to the first big island, the one you can see out there,’’ I said, pointing. ‘“That’s

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where all the tourists go. There are a bunch of rusticlooking restaurants that charge big-city prices, water motor scooters for rent, parachute rides, glass-bottom boats, all that shit. So many people go out there they’ll spend half the day looking before they’re sure we’re not there. We’re going a lot farther out to a second set of islands. It takes an hour longer to get there, but it’s well worth the ride.”’ She had taken her hat off and the wind was blowing her hair. “‘It’s marvelous,’’ she said. “‘I’ve always wanted to do something like this.”’ I dug into my bag and pulled out a bottle of PABA suntan lotion with an eight rating. ‘“‘Here, cover your skin with this. The tropical sun is treacherous. You don’t want to go back to Seattle looking like a boiled lobster.”’ How do you describe a perfect day at Pattaya? We fished offshore for a couple of hours with hand lines and squid for bait, catching a bucketful of. pan-size groupers and red snappers. After that, Mustache anchored the boat off a white sand beach on one of the smaller islands and we snorkeled for another hour, watching schools of fish play among the antler-and brain coral formations punctuated by colorful Christmas tree worms that shriveled up into nothing at the touch of a finger. Mustache and his wife cooked lunch while we skindived, cleaning and frying the best of the fish in four different ways. They also made fish lemon-grass soup, the best dish of all Thai cuisine. They served it all with fried rice and fresh green onions. We chased it down with the wine, cold from the boat’s ice locker.

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After we stuffed ourselves, we swam the twenty yards to the beach and spent an hour or so looking for shells and lying in the sun. When she had peeled off the sun suit, she had uncovered a black and green one-piece bathing suit cut high on the hips. Her legs were great, and whenever I looked where the black strip crossed over her crotch my cock gave a twitch that hurt a bit more each time. We joked, laughed, and touched a bit. I

don’t know which of us was having the best time—her enjoying the sea, the sand, the crystal-clear water, and the bright sun, or me getting off on watching her. About 2:30 in the afternoon, we abandoned the white sand, swam out, and climbed up the ladder to the deck. Mustache started his diesel engine again and we headed back to the mainland. Christy and I lay down on a couple of folding chairs on the deck in the shade of the canopy. We each drank a beer and took a nap. About two and a half hours later, Mustache ran his boat onto the beach right in front of my bungalow, a ‘ good three or four miles up the coast from where we had taken off that morning. We were still lost as far as the two men in the green Mercedes were concerned. I took a few of the bigger fish out of the icebox and passed them to Ari, who had come down to the beach to help us unload. I told Mustache to take the rest of the fish and gave him his fee plus the expected tip. I told him as he pulled anchor not to answer any questions about where he had dropped us off. ‘‘How about a shower to wash off the salt water,’’ I suggested to Christy, showing her where the guest bathroom was. ‘“‘I thought you might like a change from

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seafood. Ari’s got a couple of steaks in the icebox. I'll light the grill while you’re washing off.”’ I took a shower, too, changing into a pair of jeans and an old T-shirt. I mixed myself a light Scotch and soda and sat down on the porch outside, watching the charcoal get perfect for steaks. She came out wearing a wrap-around skirt and a jacket over the sun suit. She must have had it in the beach bag she’d been carrying on the boat. It was a little past six and the sun was already halfway underwater at the edge of the world. The dust in the air gave us a sunset that wasn’t great, but not all that bad. I fixed a drink for her, put her in a chair, and started

the steaks. There’s an old-fashioned picnic table on my porch. It’s the only place you can sit down to eat when you visit me. We sat opposite each other, talking and passing a lot of smiles back and forth. When we finished we both carried the dishes into the kitchen. Ari, doing what she knows she’s supposed to do, had disappeared for the night. The sun had long gone down. Venus stood guarding the quarter moon sparkling the ocean in front of us. ‘This is unbelievable,’’

Christy said as she walked

down the porch steps and toward the beach. ‘‘I’m having trouble believing I’m really here. It’s just like the — travel books talk about.”’ “Take a deep breath,’’ I said. clean, salt air all the way down.”’

‘‘You can feel that

‘““God, yes, and look at the stars. I can’t remember when I last saw the Milky Way.”’

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I was standing right behind, so I didn’t have to move forward when my arms went around her. I had been disappointed enough that I worried she would move out of reach and suggest it was time to take her back to the hotel. After all, she was back working for Auerbauch and she did have those principles about business and fun. Instead she moved back against me, leaning her head on my shoulder so I could rub my chin along the side, " mixing her hair and my beard. I pulled her around and we kissed, starting out gentle, but getting frantic in a hurry. It lasted a long time. When it was over, she pulled back a bit, looking up. “‘Damn it,’’ she said, “‘how the hell am I supposed to resist a combination like you and this setting? It’s unreal, like I’m Wendy and I’ve flown off with a boy that never grew up.”’ If she had kept on like that, she might have talked herself out of it, so I kissed her again, her responses ‘ telling me the decision was made as I moved my hands down her back to grab her firm little ass. We were all alone, but we didn’t sink slowly to the

ground and get it on in the sand while the water lapped at our feet. Sex and sand don’t mix, unless you like

pain. Instead we went back into the bungalow. I led her into the guest bedroom, picking there instead of my own room so we could enjoy the evening air through open windows. We dropped to the bed, still kissing, while my hands looked for places to explore. The little jacket went first, then we opened the top of the sun suit, popping out

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medium-sized breasts topped with small nipples and big aureoles. As I nibbled on one, my fingers slid up under the pants of the sun suit and through the curls. She was already wet. I pulled the rest of her clothes off to find the curls the same sandy-blond color as her hair. She had managed to get my fly unzipped and her hand was in my shorts, grasping and playing. ‘‘Please get your clothes off. I can’t wait. I want it in me,”’ she said. I had to stand up to take off my jeans. While I did, she swung her legs all the way on the bed and lay there watching me while she waited. I switched off the electric light, letting the moon take over the job, and lay down beside her. We kissed for a while, lying side by side. I moved up over her. She opened her legs so I could fit between them. I supported myself on my elbows and ran my fingers through her hair, holding the sides of her head as I leaned forward and kissed her. Our tongues met while my penis, oozing a drop of juice, rubbed against her clit. It’s not the best time to ask the question, but I’ve never figured out what the best time is. ‘‘Is this safe?”’ I asked, hoping we weren’t going to have to interrupt the fun while one of us went looking for something to put on or in. She answered with a little moan while she grabbed me and guided me in with one hand, pulling on my backside with the other. As I hit bottom, I could feel the top of my cock brush against the diaphragm deep inside

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her. She must have gotten ready while she was taking her shower. I started moving my hips slowly, taking my cock all the way out on the upstrokes and rubbing the tip against her clit. She moaned, ‘‘So good, so good, so big and hard.”’ I thought it was pretty good, too, and I speeded up the movement a bit, now staying inside, but making a couple of adjustments to get the best angle for us both. She raised her legs, gripping my sides, while she crossed her calves over mine. “*You’re incredible,’’ I gasped as I felt her pussy grasp me, squeezing, increasing the pleasure. It was so good I started to worry if I could make it last as long as I wanted it to. The wait and the disappointments had filed my firing mechanism down to a hair trigger. I rolled over, taking her with me and keeping the connection together. With her on top, I could relax a bit, cooling myself down by watching the fun she was - having bouncing against my pubic bone. There was enough moonlight through the window that I could see myself disappearing into her thick copper curls. She put her hands on my chest, straightening up a bit, her face twisting like she was hurting. I could feel the tip of my cock hitting against her cervix on each bounce. I ran my hands through her hair, pulling her down for a kiss, then letting her go while I grabbed - hold of a breast with each hand. She started to groan, then whimper. Finally, she let loose with a scream that must have given every male in the neighborhood an instant hard-on.

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That’s all it took for me. I followed her into the ring of pleasure, making my own noises along the way. A few moments later, she rolled off and we lay side by side, still embracing, but now with the gentleness that comes after. ‘‘Damn you, damn you, damn you,”’ she whispered. ‘‘Why do you have to be so good?’’ That was the beginning of a very nice night. It’s funny how the more you want something, and the longer you have to wait for it, the better it is when you finally get it.

Vil.

The smell of frying eggs, sizzling bacon, and freshly ground coffee passed under the bedroom door and woke me up. Ari was back at work and in her kitchen. Christy was stili there beside me, sleeping, her hair trying to hide the pillow while one white breast peeked over an arm. She stirred a bit, caught the scents of breakfast, and came awake as she sat up. She gave me a look that hollered “‘wow!”’ as a comment on the night’s activities, then focused on the smells that were coming from the kitchen. “‘What have you been doing?’’ she asked, looking at me and trying to figure out why I was still there instead of in the kitchen. ‘‘Cooking breakfast in the nude?’’ ‘*That’s Ari,’’ I explained. “‘She comes in early.”’ Christy grabbed for the sheet and hauled it up over her breasts, suddenly modest with the knowledge that 129

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we weren’t alone in the bungalow. ‘‘I’ve never made love with a man rich enough to hire someone to cook breakfast. How are we supposed to handle this? We can’t just put on our clothes, walk out, and say ‘good morning,’ can we?”’ “ll put my pants and shirt on and go back to my room, take a shower, trim my beard, and meet you on the porch for breakfast.’’ ‘This is weird,’’ she whispered, aware of the ease with which sound bounced through the thin walls. Then she frowned. ‘‘I guess your cook is used to this sort of thing?”’ ‘“‘Not really,’’ I said as I stepped into my jeans. “‘I won’t lie and say you’re the first, but this isn’t a parade ground, either. It’s been a long time since Ari cooked breakfast for two.”’ She was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, watching while I hunted around the floor for my shirt. She let the sheet fall back to the bed once she realized that Ari wasn’t suddenly going to burst through the door and catch us. I liked that. It always bothers me when a woman tries to hide everything from view the next morning, like she was ashamed of what you had spent the night doing. “You are something, you know?’’ she whispered. ‘‘I guess I forgot how good it could be. But damn! Why did I have to find you ten-thousand miles from home?’’ I found the shirt under the bedspread and pulled it on over my head. That done, I walked over and gave her a quick kiss on the mouth, then two longer kisses on each

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nipple. Then I moved back to her mouth, staying for a while. She let out a moan as her tongue found mine. I debated myself about the possibilities of a morning quickie and decided not to try. It wouldn’t be any fun doing it without noise so Ari wouldn’t hear us. I broke the kiss and stood up. ‘‘What’s a home?’’ I asked. *‘Last night it was here for both of us.’’ I turned and walked out, leaving her to ponder my question. As I crossed the hallway en route to my room, I looked in the kitchen and threw Ari a glare that strangled the smirk on her face. Ari’s been trying to marry me off since she first started working for me. She always jumps to the conclusion that any lady I let her meet is going to be the perfect one. It had been a while since I had brought anyone home, and she was probably already planning a wedding and betting with her sister about whether the first kid would be a boy or a girl. Ari would never understand my commitment to not repeat-ing a second time the painful mistake I once made by deciding a woman and I were a perfect match.

We drove back to the Merlin after breakfast. The green Mercedes was gone. We went up to Christy’s room and I sat watching her change out of the beach clothes into a dress. She tried to change the underwear, too. When she got that far, I got horny all over again. While I was kissing her, my fingers, which were helping to get her panties off, discovered she had the same problem. It took a noisy hour before we got around to packing her bags and checking her out of the hotel.

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We headed straight back to Bangkok. It was a different kind of ride than the one coming down. In Pattaya, we had crossed a line that turned us into two different people from the ones who had sat so stiff and far apart two days before. I kept looking at the soft, loving woman beside me, trying to match her with the uptight career lady I had tried to figure out on the long plane ride across the Pacific a few days before. The talk between us as I drove through the foothills that marked the first part of the drive out of Pattaya was as casual and natural as what happened next. She was wearing a white blouse and a dark green flair-style skirt. Instead of objecting when I reached across and put my hand on her knee, she shifted toward me, letting her legs spread a bit, inviting my hand up through her panties. I was starting to believe that I had finally found a girl who could enjoy sex as much as I do. The traffic on the divided highway was light and I was keeping the speed needle under the ninety-kilometer mark so I could enjoy the fun. We were on a long straightaway passing a large hill covered with jungle growth. She moved her upper body toward me as my fingers found the panty line. I checked the traffic, found nothing near us, and took my eyes off the road to lean into a quick kiss. I never got the kiss, but I saved my life on the way. The tempered glass of the windshield, which is put on

all Japanese

cars

not

sold in the United

States,

shattered with a pop and showered us both with thousands of small crystal slivers. A supersonic crack hurt

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my ear as it announced a near miss of what had to be a high-powered rifle slug. Christy screamed. I jerked back up, trying to keep control of the car while shaking the glass crystals off my face and eyebrows. The damn stuff is supposed to break into pieces that don’t cut, but the force of the wind had driven a couple of them into the skin on the right side of my face and I could feel drops of blood forming there. Instinct took over and my foot hit the brake, suddenly slowing the car while my hands steered to the side of the road. Instinct can get you dead. Whoever had fired the shot was still out there and we were still in the kill zone. I ordered my nervous system off automatic, hollered at Christy to shut up and get down, pumped the gas, and wiggled the wheel, weaving the car back and forth, making us a harder target. Now that he had missed the first shot, I hoped the bastard was using a scoped rifle that would be harder to line up than open sights. It must have been a scope, because we traveled a good three-hundred yards before the second shot hit, breaking out the window on Christy’s side and raining more glass on her. As I glanced at the damage, I saw she had done what I told her to do. She was bent forward, her head on her knees, her hands clasped over the back of her neck in the classic airplane-ditch position. We were picking up speed as I crouched behind the wheel, squinting my eyes till I could hardly see, hoping that I wouldn’t catch a blinding piece of glass. We had passed his hiding place and he hurried the third shot,

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hitting low on the back of the trunk with a loud ripping thunk. We caught up with a ten-wheel truck lumbering up the hill with its load of tapioca chips. It was the first time I was ever happy to find one of those traffic hazards in front of me. I whipped around him and pulled in, taking advantage of his bulk to cut the line of fire. I slowed down and let the air out of my lungs for the first time since the windshield had suddenly shattered. Churchill was right. There is nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed. ‘You all right?’’ I shouted at Christy over the sound of the wind blowing through the shattered windows. She sat up, showing me the terror still controlling her face. She had a few drops of blood furrowing down the skin on the side that had been toward the window. Her lap was covered with pieces of glass and others clung to her dress and sprinkled through her hair. She moved her hands to her front, holding them out, afraid of lowering them into the glass. ‘Don’t worry,’’ I shouted, hoping she wasn’t going to panic or go into shock. ‘‘The glass slivers won’t cut. Just brush them off.’’ She gave it a tentative try, found I was right, and went to work cleaning herself off a bit. She said something, but she couldn’t get enough volume for me to hear her over the wind and the traffic noise. ‘‘T don’t want to stop yet!’’ I shouted. ‘‘Sit tight for a while and don’t worry; they missed.”’ I slowed down to about fifty kilometers an hour, as

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fast as I dared go with the whole front windshield gone. Hopefully, the bastard who shot at us was in hiding by now, but I couldn’t take a chance that he was following us, or even the possibility he had someone up the road waiting for a second try. As soon as I could, I turned off the main highway, following some back roads around the town of Cholburi. I knew a detour that would take several hours longer, but would get us into Bangkok by a back door. About twenty seconds after the turnoff, I decided it was Safe to pull over and clean the glass off myself and the seat. Christy got out on her side and started sweeping glass slivers out of the car onto the ground. She still hadn’t said a thing. I wasn’t sure whether it was shock or she was trying hard to show me what a good partner she made for an aging soldier of fortune. “‘Thanks,’’ I said as I moved around to her side of the car, working at the chore of breaking the few remaining pieces of glass out of the front windowpane.

**You’re taking it like they shot at you every day.”’ She stood up straight and looked at me, a couple of pieces of glass still catching sunshine in her hair. ‘‘I’ve been trying to convince myself that’s not what happened, that it was a loose rock off a truck, a bird, the hot weather, or anything else.”’ I grabbed her and pulled her in close for a while. When she stopped shaking a bit, I pointed out the hole

in the back seat of the car. Then I pulled her by the hand around to the rear end, where we found the place the last round had punched through the sheet metal of the trunk lid.

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‘‘Someone shot at us,’’ I said, leading her back to her seat. She was taking it all fairly well. She was even ready to start asking questions. ‘‘Did those two thugs who were following us around yesterday try to ambush us? But why? Bumper ought to know that would only convince Auerbauch not to finance his rescue mission.”’ I helped her back into the car, walked around to my own side, got in, and started back down the road. ‘Maybe it wasn’t Butz,’’ I shouted once we got going. ‘‘Maybe Wilai ordered it on his own. Whatever, I’m going to keep you out of sight until I can get it figured out.”’ ‘‘What’s to figure out?’’ She was now up to hollering over the wind. ‘‘This proves they’re crooks. Get me to a phone. I’m calling Auerbauch and telling him you were right. It’s all a fraud.”’ ‘“‘Not yet,’’ I shouted back. “‘We can’t be positive that Wilai or Butz ordered it. ’'ve made a few other people unhappy along my crooked path. Maybe the past just caught up with me. Anyway, if it was that slimy little bastard Wilai, I want to get enough evidence to break his rice bowl in as many pieces as that damn windshield.’’ It was almost dark when we finally got back to Bangkok. I drove straight to Boonma’s office on Ekamai Road. I knew he usually hung around long after his employees had gone home. I figured he could find me a new car to use and handle turning the Toyota back to the rental company along with the necessary cash to

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avoid questions about the damage. I also wanted to find out what he had learned while we played young lovers in Pattaya. ‘We followed Wilai all the way to Mai Sai. He is still in one of the hotels up there. He’s got some strange and dangerous friends.”’ We were in Boonma’s office. It was as cluttered as usual,- and the walls were covered with pictures of Boonma standing next to a couple of dozen different U.S. Army officers he had worked with back in the old days. He’d poured us some of the fresh-brewed coffee he always had ready and managed to find some sugar and fake cream for Christy while I filled him in on the ambush. ““You’re telling me that he’s into dealing these days?”’ I asked. **That’s what it looks like from the kinds of people that paraded through his hotel yesterday.”’ **Are you talking about narcotics?’’ Christy interjected. ‘‘T thought people made enough money in narcotics so they didn’t have to get involved in other kinds of crime.”’ ‘*That’s in your country,’’ Boonma explained. *‘Up in Mai Sai and along the Thai/Burmese border, everybody’s into narcotics, but most people don’t make that much money at it. A kilo of heroin that will bring a million bucks on the streets of New York is only worth

about $3,000 or $4,000 in Mai Sai.”’ ‘‘Maybe Wilai is trying to recruit people for the raid in Laos,’’ Christy suggested, still not ready to completely give up the chance of a rescue mission.

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‘‘Normally that would be a good place to hire a few mercenaries,’ Boonma agreed. ‘‘There are a dozen different warlords in the area usually willing to hire their men out to anyone with the cash. Even the Thai government used to hire the Shan United Army people to guard road construction gangs back when they were still fighting the Communist insurgents.”’ ‘‘Then it’s possible that’s what Wilai is doing,”’ Christy asked, “‘hiring mercenaries?’’ Boonma shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette. ‘‘I don’t think he could find anybody willing to rent soldiers right now. There’s a power struggle about to explode up there on the Burma side of the border. A new man on the scene is trying to corner the opium trade out of northern Burma. He’s supposed to be smart and vicious. He’s recruited a large army out of the Shan States in Burma and people are predicting a new opium war.”’ ‘‘T heard about him,’’ I threw in to let Christy know I wasn’t completely ignorant of the situation. ‘‘His name’s Ap Aue Pak. He came out of nowhere; nobody really knows much about him.”’ ‘‘Except that he’s a vicious bastard.’ Boonma got up and poured me and himself another cup of coffee. Christy hadn’t got past the second sip of hers. Even with a heavy dose of sugar and Pream, it was still too strong for her American tastes. ‘So Wilai is dealing,’’ I said, deciding it was time to move back to our problem. ‘‘Did you learn anything else?”’ “‘My operative got a list of his phone calls through

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the hotel switchboard.’’ Boonma, who was still standing in front of his large wooden desk, searched through one of the piles of his papers and found a notepad. ‘‘He made two calls to his office here, and there was a long-distance collect call yesterday from Pattaya.’’ “That would be his men calling to tell him that they lost us,’’ I guessed. ‘‘I bet he gave them the order to set

up the ambush then.”’

:

‘The puzzle is his man Captain Somsuk.’’ Boonma walked back behind his desk and sat down in the oversized leather executive chair that had once belonged to a U.S. Air Force general. ‘‘He’s spent almost all his time the last two days down at the Pearl S. Buck Foundation office. All he did was hang around and talk to several of the women who came in for the monthly checks their kids are getting.”’ Christy was going to ask a question, but I spoke first. ‘‘That’s the foundation the famous lady author set up before she died several years ago. It provides assistance to the children the Gls left behind. Mothers who can prove their kid is an Amerasian get small monthly payments to help pay for milk and schooling.’’ I turned my attention back to Boonma. ‘‘What the hell would Somsuk and Wilai be doing with those people? You think he’s trying to involve the mothers in the heroin trade?”’ ‘‘T can’t imagine how,’’ Boonma answered. ‘‘Wilai and Somsuk have so many little crooked deals going that it’s probably something else. He could be helping them file fraudulent claims with the foundation. I’ve often wondered how they decided which prostitute got

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pregnant with an American and which one tangled with a German tourist.”’ ‘‘Whatever Somsuk is doing with the Pearl S. Buck people, I can’t imagine it has anything to do with our problem,’’ I suggested. ‘‘Keep your men on them both and let me know if anything develops.”’ Boonma loaned us a little Datsun pickup and we went looking for a place to stay. I wanted to keep out of sight, so we didn’t go back to the Dusitani. I didn’t © want a hotel where you have to sign the register and show a passport. In Bangkok, there is one kind of hotel where you don’t have to do that. I drove over to one of the fancy love hotels sprinkled around the city. They look like old-style motels with a garage for every room. The garages have curtains that hide the car as soon as a loving couple pull in, and the rooms rent for three hours at a time. I expected to get a squawk out of Christy when she discovered where I was taking her. Instead, it was like the blindfolds when we went to Butz’s place—a big adventure in the spy business. I could hear her gasps as she checked out the room and some of the special equipment that went with it while I paid the service boy enough money to cover a whole night. When I followed her inside, I found her standing in front of a piece of furniture that looked like a combination of a lounge chair and a GYN examining table. The special armrests were designed to support a lady’s legs, giving her lover a straight shot at the target while he was standing in front of the chair. ‘“‘My God!”’ she said. ‘‘I never knew they made this

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sort of thing.’ She looked in my direction and suddenly got red. The good sport in her came out and she started laughing. ‘‘I hope you don’t expect me to climb up on that thing. I’d feel like I was making love to my gynecologist.”’ The room service was better than what you find in the big hotels and a lot cheaper, if one doesn’t mind Thai and Chinese food. They even served us a reasonably good bottle of Australian wine. By nine o’clock that evening, with the wine acting as an aphrodisiac, Christy decided she would climb up on the special piece of furniture, just for one try. Sf

In the morning, we ate breakfast in the hotel room while I tried to figure out what to do next. Unless Boonma came up with something, we were blocked. I was convinced Wilai was a fraud and that Butz was too dumb to figure it out, but I couldn’t see any way to prove it, other than marching into Laos and taking my

~ own look. With no ideas, I started making a few calls back to people I had asked to keep their eyes open. Steve Austin was the third name I tried. ‘‘Why don’t you leave forwarding addresses?’’ he asked when I got hold of him. ‘‘The Dusitani desk said you were in Pattaya, but your maid down there didn’t know where you were.”’ I gave him my apologies, decided | didn’t want the embassy knowing about the ambush, and asked why he was looking for me. ‘‘T was talking about your little problem with a cou-

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ple of people and discovered the air attaché here knew Abe Auerbauch. He flew with him out of Thakli. I thought you might like to talk with him.’’ I couldn’t imagine what I could learn that would help me, but decided it was better than spending the day hiding in a hotel. I accepted Steve’s invitation to come by the embassy and meet the attaché. I picked up the box with Abe’s belongings that I had been carrying around with me since Seattle and told Christy to enjoy herself with the TV in the room. She was in for a surprise when she turned it on and found what the hotel channel featured on a twenty-four-hour basis. Christy didn’t like the idea of staying alone in a hot-sheet hotel, but I didn’t like the idea of someone using her for target practice. I still wasn’t completely convinced that Wilai had arranged the firepower display on the way back from Pattaya. The other possible explanations out of my past were more competent than his people, and the day could be dangerous. I paid the smirking little man at the hotel entrance another day’s worth of hours and drove down to the embassy, cursing the time I knew I would spend going through the embassy security to get into Steve’s office. The attaché was there waiting when Steve’s secretary escorted me in. He was wearing a summer uniform with eagles on his shoulders. He was about six feet tall, and when we sat down, his shirt spread out across his belly, straining the buttons. He probably spent a lot of time worrying about whether or not he was going to pass his next flight physical.

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“‘Morgan, this is Colonel Chris Stefens,’’ Steve said as I shook hands with the man. After the introductions, I told Colonel Stefens a bit about what I was doing and pulled out the materials I had brought along that were supposed to have belonged to Auerbauch’s grandson. _ He sat looking at the things for a few minutes, focusing on the picture. ‘‘That’s Auerbauch,”’ he said. ‘‘T’ll never forget the little shit.’’ ““You don’t sound like you were fond of him,’ I said. ‘“‘T hated his fucking guts. He was a cocky little bastard who had declared war on the whole world. What we were doing out here was just an excuse for him to do some killing and make himself rich. I suspected he was selling PX booze to one of the local bars,

but I never could prove it.”’ I was surprised at the anger in the man after all these years. Usually the military sticks together when the - civilian world comes around. Besides, Abe was missing, and I didn’t think anybody would wish that on a fellow flyer. ‘*You make him sound psychotic,’’ I said. ‘*What was he doing in the air force if he liked killing? I thought those kind of people went into the infantry or the Green Berets.”’ ‘*He liked the comforts and pleasures of life, too. He loved the idea of getting out of the bed of a beautiful woman, eating a good meal, and then climbing into the seat of a jet plane to fly a thousand miles to bomb hell out of some poor bastard.”’

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The colonel was still holding the picture, looking at it. ‘‘God! He could pick his women.’’ Stefens’s eyes glazed like they do when old memories burst into flame. ‘‘She was something, the prettiest girl in an airman’s town full of pretty girls. I never could figure out what she saw in that little prick.”’ ‘*You knew her, too?’’ I asked, wondering if the girl might not have something to do with the way the colonel felt about the dead. ‘‘Her name was Toy. She was the most popular girl working in the Villa Club. After Abe picked her up, he kept her in his off-base housing as a tea lock.”’

Tea lock. It had been years since I heard the words. It was a GI corruption of the Thai words tii rak, which means lover, more or less. The Gls used it to describe the girls that the officers would set up as private stock in off-base quarters. The colonel was still reminiscing about the good old days. ‘‘When Auerbauch didn’t come back from his last mission, we figured she would go back to work at the Villa. A couple of guys were planning a party to celebrate her return to the professional life. Instead, she disappeared. Nobody ever did find out what happened to her. I guess she really did love the little bastard.’’ The colonel hesitated, took another look at the picture, put it down, and turned his attention to the other things. He sat there studying them, picking up the ring and looking at it, then the dog tags, and finally the credit and identification cards. ““You say somebody was supposed to have found these in Laos?’’ he asked, looking up at me.

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‘That's what the man is claiming. Auerbauch had them on him when he went down.”’ “It may be Abe’s stuff, but I’ll guarantee he didn’t have this junk in the plane with him.”’ ‘‘What do you mean? ”’ J asked, realizing that maybe the trip through the embassy security might be worth the time it took. ‘“*Auerbauch was a shit, but he flew by the book. Some men liked to carry a few souvenirs for luck, even if it was against regulation. Not Auerbauch. He told me once he hoped no one would find out who he was if he went down. He said it would be the ultimate insult if he got special attention in a prison camp because a grandfather he hated was a rich American capitalist.’’ I have to admit I didn’t know much about pilot procedures in war, and I guess my friend Bumper Butz, the Green Beret, didn’t either. “*You mean pilots don’t carry this kind of stuff?” “‘The only thing we carried was our survival gear, our pistol, our dog tags, and our Geneva convention card. Wherever they found this stuff, it wasn’t in Laos.”’ ‘‘What about the dog tags? He wouldn’t. have left them someplace, would he?’’

The colonel picked up the tags and looked at them again. ‘‘These don’t look like regular-issue tags. They look like the souvenir tags some of the guys used to get made for their tea locks. It was a fad around the base for a while. All the girls were wearing dog tags around their necks. I think they thought the tags were some kind of lucky charm that would bring the men back.”’

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Damn, I thought. The answer was so simple. “‘He must have left these things with his girlfriend, right?’’ ‘‘Whenever we lost a pilot we’d go by his off-base quarters, if he had them, and try and pick up any personal effects we could find. Who knows how much stuff the girls managed to keep? Some of them could get pretty possessive. Our people in the consular section say that the women claiming their children are GI brats often produce personal effects as evidence of their onetime love affair.” I thanked both Steve and the colonel for their help, told them they had just solved the case, and got out of there as fast as I could. Now I could explain where Abe Auerbauch’s things had come from. All I needed was one more piece in the puzzle, and I knew just the man who could help me find that.

Forty-five minutes later I was sitting in front of Boonma’s desk, drinking some of his wake-me-up-witha-bang-in-the-gut coffee. ‘‘I was wrong yesterday,’’ I explained after filling him in on the morning conversation. ‘‘Somsuk hanging around the Pearl S. Buck foundation has everything to do with my problem. He and Wilai have discovered a new use for war souvenirs. He was on a treasure hunt, hoping some of the girls would have the same kinds of things they tried to palm off on Auerbauch.”’ ‘‘It sounds like a shaky way to build an argument the men are still alive,’? Boonma said. “It’s exactly the kind of half-assed deal Wilai’s mind would come up with. He probably didn’t start out with

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that in mind. More likely, he hoped to try and sell these things back to the families of the missing men. He may even have just been conning the women, making them pay for his service while he claimed he was using the goodies to find the men in the States.’’ Boonma, who never could sit still for more than two minutes, jumped up and walked around the desk. On the way he knocked three files onto the floor. He bent over and picked them up, mixing them together as he threw them into the middle of the desk. I’ve always been convinced that Boonma works from memory alone but uses the files as props when he’s dealing with a

customer. He sat down on the other chair in front of his desk. ‘*Then Bumper Butz shows up looking for clues that prove there are still prisoners and Wilai decides he has the perfect sucker. So what do you want to do now?”’ ‘Find the girl, of course. Wilai must have found her, -$O you can, too.”’ “*T figured you wanted me and my boys to burn the shoe leather,’’ Boonma said. ‘*I can’t make any guarantees. Wilai might even be hiding the woman, making sure we don’t find her. He’s got to figure she’s the weak point in it all.’’ He picked up the picture that I was still carrying around. ‘‘I’ll have to get several copies made. That’ll take a half day. Any suggestions where we should start looking?”’ ‘She looks like she was only eighteen or nineteen back in those days. That would put her in her midthirties. She could still be in the trade. You might try

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the bars on Soi Cowboy. The girls there tend to be older and more experienced.”’ Boonma had some other news, too. “‘Incidentally, I think you will be safe on the streets.”’ “Why?” ‘*Wilai, Somsuk, and their boys have all gone into hiding.”’ ‘Gone into hiding?’’ I asked. “‘You mean you’ve lost them.”’ ‘‘No, we know where they are; they just think they’ve gone into hiding. Wilai is still in Mai Sai, but he hasn’t left his hotel room. He got a phone call early today from his Bangkok office. It was from one of those goons who was following you around. They pulled in about 2:30 this morning. We were watching from both ends. My man in Wilai’s hotel said you could hear him shouting all over the floor.’’ ‘“What was he saying?’’ ‘“You didn’t ask for a telephone tap,’’ Boonma said in defense of his operation. ‘‘All we got was what we could hear through the wall. Mostly he was shouting words like ‘incompetent,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘snake brain,’ that kind of thing. I’m not sure whether he’s mad because they failed or because they even tried.”’ ‘*Wilai probably thought this was going to be the big score. I wonder what he’s telling Butz.’’ . ‘“You want us to try and find out, put a tail on the American?”’ “‘No, he’s going to be sitting by a phone waiting for us to call him, or calling Auerbauch directly. What did the boys in the green Mercedes do after the call?’’

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‘They split up in a hurry and went underground.”’ Boonma searched for and found another piece of paper. ‘“‘One’s hiding out in a slum on the other side of the river. The other headed for a provincial town down south. Somsuk moved in with a minor wife he thinks is a secret. The only man watching the office is a Chinese fellow about twenty years old.’’ ‘*That will be the kid who was following me the first day. He has one of those moles on his chin with long hairs hanging down from it.”’ I left Boonma in charge of the search for Toy and went back to the hot-sheet palace. I collected Christy, turned off the room TV with the pornographic movie I caught her watching, and drove over to the Regent Hotel. While it probably was safe to get back in public, I wasn’t going to make it easy by going back to the same hotel we had stayed in before, just in case somebody was still looking for the target on my back. _ On the way over to the hotel, I briefed Christy on what I had discovered about the grandson’s personal effects. I told her that finding the girl would be the final proof. ‘*That sounds pretty difficult,’’ she said. *‘I read in one of those tourist brochures that 6 million people live in Bangkok. I can’t imagine how your detective friend hopes to find one person with just a picture. How do we know she even lives in Bangkok? The Auerbauch boy knew her in an upcountry base.”’ ‘It could be easier than it sounds. Those girls follow some basic patterns. When the bases closed down, most of them moved to Bangkok and kept following the same

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profession. They also tend to keep servicing the same kind of clientele. Toy was into Americans. She probably picked up quite a bit of English in Thakli. If she is still working at the trade, it will be in a bar catering to farangs.”’ ‘‘Wouldn’t she be too old for that kind of thing?’’ ‘‘Thai women wear well. More than one GI took a bride home who turned out to be ten years older than he thought she was when he married his Asian Cinderella.”’ We drove up the driveway in front of the Regent. I pulled our suitcases out of the back of the pickup and got a nasty stare from the man in the white uniform when I tried to hand him the keys to the dirty white pickup. When he saw the red hundred-baht note I had wrapped around the keys, he decided it wasn’t beneath his dignity to park anything but a Mercedes. It took Boonma and his men two days and they still didn’t find Toy. They did find several people who knew her, including the owner of a bar she had been working in. They also found an address where she lived in Bangkok. Christy and I were lying by the hotel pool when a bellboy walked through with a small blackboard with my name written on it announcing I had a telephone call. Boonma gave me the directions for her apartment first. ‘‘Don’t bother going by. It’s locked up tight. The boss at the bar she’s been working at says she’s gone home to visit her parents.”’ ‘‘Any idea when she’s coming back?’’ ‘‘Nobody knows; it could be tomorrow,

it could be

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next month. You know how it is. These kind of girls are pretty casual about work as long as they’ve got some cash in their pocket.”’ “You find out where her parents live?’’ “She told a friend she was from a village in Mai Ai District, up north of Chiang Mai. It’s called Ban La Mai.”’ He anticipated my next question. ‘‘We looked but can’t find it on the map. They will know where it is in the district office, but someone will have to go up there and ask. Want me to send a man?”’ I thought about it for a minute. I wanted personal proof that I had seen myself. I wanted to be able to give it to Butz and watch his face. I wanted to make sure he couldn’t argue that some guy was sitting in a jungle jail because of something I did. I don’t need people on my back trail like Bumper. The only way to make sure was to get the proof he had been made a fool of. “Pll do that,’’ I told Boonma. *‘I need to do some. thing to earn the money the man in Seattle is paying me.”’ Walking back to where Christy was still soaking up sun, I got thinking about her and the time we had spent together since Pattaya. Things ought to be wrapped up in a day or two and that meant she would be going home. It was probably just as well. I was getting too used to having her around. Give it another week and I’d be reexamining my commitment to freedom and the single state. Still, it was the finest stuff that had come my way in a long time and I wanted as much of it as I

could get in the time we had left. If I was going to

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Chiang Mai for a day or two, I wanted to take her with me. I sat down beside her and filled her in on my conversation with Boonma and my plans to go find the woman myself. I didn’t have any problem talking her into going along on the trip.

IX.

I booked us on the first flight the next day to Chiang Mai. We drove out to the airport in the Datsun pickup and I left it sitting in the parking lot in front of the _ domestic airline terminal. It would still be there when we got back, and the parking fees were less than it ‘would have cost for a taxi to the airport and back. The Thai Airways 737 took seventy minutes to cover the 400 miles between Bangkok and the ancient walled city in the north that serves these days as a mecca for tourists who think they are getting off the beaten track in Asia. The city is also a bonanza for narcotics traffickers locking for the cheapest heroin in the world. Christy and I weren’t interested in tourist attractions or narcotics. | had made arrangements in Bangkok and the local Hertz man was waiting at the airport with another Japanese car. This one was a tan Datsun. I 153

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signed the papers, took the keys, and we climbed inside. We drove into and through Chiang Mai while Christy oohed and aahed at the remains of the old city wall and the moat that still surrounds it. We passed through the White Elephant Gate and headed north. ‘‘How far is the drive?’’ she asked while we waited at the last traffic light between Bangkok and the North Pole. “It'll take about three hours, maybe longer. Mai Ai is a little district all the way up against the Burmese border.”’ ‘I guess I should have asked sooner, but is this a dangerous trip?’ “It’s paved all the way to the border and very safe and civilized. The danger starts on the other side. The

Burmese government has no control over their side for thousands of square miles. It’s the realm of the opium warlords, men like Khun Sa, General Li, Chang Shu Shuan, and that new guy Boonma mentioned, Ap Aue Pak.”’ It took us over four hours because we stopped along the way to watch an elephant show with real elephants pretending to do real work. Christy got me to join her and the line of tourists waiting to get up on the back of one of the beasts for a ten-minute ride through the jungle. The town of Mai Ai isn’t much. It’s only been a district headquarters for about six years. It does have a brand-new district office and that’s where I went to get directions to the village of Ban La Mai. I parked in front of the cement two-story building, suggested to

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Christy that she wait for a couple of minutes, and walked up the stairs looking for the district officer. The district officer wasn’t in, but a young Thai woman wearing a khaki Thai civil-service uniform directed me into the office of one of the deputies. I found a pudgy fellow wearing a wrinkled light-blue safari suit sitting behind a desk considerably older than the building. Looking him over before he glanced up from the forms he was busily signing, I found he was typical of too many Thai provincial officials in the remote parts of the country. He was well into middle age, going nowhere with his career, but probably enjoying life in the boondocks with all the perks that go with a government job and the petty graft that makes it possible to live well on a government salary. When he did look up, he gasped and jumped to his feet, the quick frown on his face telling me that he expected any farang who suddenly materialized in his office must be bringing trouble. _ When my explanation in Thai let him know that all I wanted was a bit of harmless information on geography, he relaxed and turned anxious to help. I explained I was trying to find the village of Ban La Mai. He took me into his boss’s office, where a large map of the district covered one wall, and pointed out the village. The map showed we had passed the turnoff that went up to the village about ten miles before we reached town. It wouldn’t be hard to find now that I knew where to look. I thanked him and was heading out the door when his curiosity got the better of his inclination to avoid knowing anything he wasn’t told to know. In Thai, he asked,

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‘‘Why do you want to go to Ban La Mai? There’s nothing there but a few farmers.’’ I couldn’t think of a reason to hide anything, so I told him I was looking for a woman that worked in Bangkok. What the hell, I thought, he might know who she was. All Thai citizens have to go into the district office every five years to get a new I.D. card, and Toy was supposed to be pretty enough to be remembered. I was carrying copies of the picture that Boonma had made. I took one out and handed it to the official. ““Do you know this woman? Did you ever see her?’’ I was watching his face while he looked at the picture, so I saw it. The expression was there for just a second, then he caught it and erased it. But I saw it; it shouted

recognition. He knew who Toy was. It had to be Toy; it sure as hell couldn’t have been Abe Auerbauch. The way he kept staring down at the picture until he had all his emotions in control told me that he wasn’t going to admit knowing anybody in the picture. He didn’t. ‘‘I’ve never seen this girl.’’ He stood there,

still holding the picture trying to figure out what to say next. The first thing he said was: ‘“‘I go to that village all the time. There is no one that looks like this girl. Don’t waste your time. Go back to Bangkok.”’ He thought of something else and reversed field. “Leave the picture with me. If anyone knows the girl, I call you, okay?”’ I learned a long time ago, if you are in a situation where people are not acting in a rational manner, it means there is something important that you don’t un-

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derstand. That can be damn dangerous. When it happens, the best thing to do is to retreat in a hurry. I told him that’s what I would do. I told him to keep the picture and gave him a card of Boonma’s I had in my wallet, asking that he call that number if he found anybody who knew the girl in the picture. As I walked out I complimented myself on my good judgment in asking Boonma for several copies of the picture to bring with me. I found Christy standing by the car, surrounded by a dozen little kids, all of them trying to practice the grammar school English that’s part of the Thai publicschool curriculum. ““Let’s go,’’ I said, anxious to get away from the district office before the man in temporary charge decided that maybe I should be told to stay around until his boss got back. Christy asked what the hurry was and I promised to _explain once we got on the highway. I was about to start the car when I saw the deputy district officer run down the back stairs of the building and hand something in an envelope to a policeman who was standing there. The policeman walked over and got on one of several motorcycles standing in front of the district office. He kicked it into life and drove past us just as I got the engine of the Datsun started. I had no choice but to follow him out. I don’t know what I would

same

way

we

have done if he had turned south, the

were

going. Instead he turned north,

heading toward the Burmese border. ‘‘Morgan! Tell me what’s the matter.”’

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‘I’m not sure,’’ I told her. ‘“But I think we just dug into an ants’ nest.’’ I explained what had gone on inside. ‘‘Why wouldn’t he admit he recognized the picture?’’ ‘‘Every explanation I can think up comes up Wilai. That bastard must have gotten here ahead of us and paid people off.”’ ‘‘My God!’’ she said. “‘Do you think they've done something to the girl?’’ ‘‘Maybe not. That district official seemed anxious to steer us away from Toy’s village.”’ I looked over and saw that Christy was grinning. “‘I suppose,’’ she said, ‘‘that means we are going right to the village.’’ ‘“You bet your cute ass we are.”’ After seeing the map in the district office, it was easy finding Ban La Mai. The village stood on both sides of the winding dirt road we had followed for twenty kilometers from the paved highway. It was close enough to the mountains to fall in the afternoon shadow of the high ridge line that marked the border with Burma. It was a typical northern Thai village with small wooden farmhouses sitting on stilts of teak. Two houses were made of cement blocks, tiles, and finely finished lumber. They stood like visitors from another country, modern intrusions on traditional life. ‘‘What do you want to bet that Toy’s parents live in one of those two houses?’’ I asked. ‘‘What makes you so sure of that?’’ she asked. ‘*That’s a new phenomenon in rural Thailand. They’re testimonies to the successful careers of the daughters in

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the fleshpots of Bangkok, or the sons in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. I’ve heard a dozen different girls tell me that one of the things they were doing with their money was building their parents a house.”’ ‘‘A prostitute devoted to her parents.’’ Christy shuddered, then growled, “‘Next you’ll be telling me about their golden hearts.”’ We stopped at the first of the modern houses, showed another copy of the picture, and got immediately directed to the second house. We had started to attract a crowd of barefoot kids and brown-skinned mothers carrying babies by the time we parked the car and walked into a little yard of the second modern house. I hollered the Thai equivalent of “‘hello the house.”’ A wrinkled little Thai lady wearing a puzzled look and sixty years of living came out. Her gray hair was cut short around her head and her lips and teeth were - stained black from chewing beetle nut. She was wearing a wrap-around sarong that covered her from the waist to the ankles and a wash-worn white brassiere that covered almost nothing up above. I put my palms together in the traditional greeting, seeing Christy do the same, and said, ‘*‘Sawadii.”’ The old lady gave me a wai and a hello back, looking more puzzled than ever. I took out a copy of the picture and held it forward,

asking her if she knew the girl in the picture. She recognized the girl and started talking, explaining something in considerable detail.

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As soon as she stopped, Christy blurted out, ‘“‘What did she say?’’ ‘*I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘‘She’s talking in the northern dialect. I think she’s saying that her daughter isn’t here.”’ I tried again but didn’t get much more out of the old woman’s chattering. She wasn’t understanding my central Thai and I wasn’t understanding her. I looked back at the growing crowd in the yard, wondering if someone else in the village might speak enough of the central dialect to act as a translator. The possibilities in that direction didn’t look good, but when I turned back to the woman, I found a young girl had come out of the house and was standing by the woman. ‘‘Hello, can I help you? What do you want from my grandmother?’’ It was good English but stilted, the kind that a really bright kid can learn in a Thai school, if she works hard and listens to the Voice of America or other English radio broadcasts. She was only twelve or thirteen, not really a child, but not a woman either. She was wearing the white blouse and blue skirt that all Thai school girls wear. She was pretty now; she would be a beauty in another four years. Her face was familiar, similar to the copy of the photo her grandmother was holding in her hands. The girl had her mother’s eyes and cheeks. But it wasn’t just Toy’s face that had been copied. The nose was from the Holy Land, the cities of Europe, and an executive office in Seattle, Washington. She stepped closer to her grandmother and took the

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picture, looked at it a second, and turned toward Christy and me. ‘‘Where did you get this picture of my mother and my father?’’ I heard Christy gasp. I did a bit of that myself. Auerbauch had a great-granddaughter. “‘We are looking for your mother,’’ I said. ‘‘We heard she was here. Can we talk to her?’’ ‘‘l’m sorry,’’ the girl answered. ‘‘My mother was here yesterday, but she went back to Bangkok this morning.’’ **Damn,’’ I said to Christy. “‘She must have been in one of those buses we passed this morning going in the other direction.”’ Christy ignored me. She was concentrating on the girl. ‘‘How do you know that’s your father?’’ she asked. **My mother has told me all about my father. He was a very brave man, but he had to fly away to fight some bad people. When I was little, my mother told me that -one day my father would come and take us to America. Now she thinks he’s dead.”’ She looked back at the picture in her hand. ‘‘This is my mother’s picture. She gave it to a man in Bangkok with some things of my father. The man told her that he would get her lots of money. Is that why you’re here?”’ Christy explained that was not why we were there, but that we were very happy we found her. Christy said we would go back to Bangkok to talk to her mother, then we would come back and visit her again. Christy didn’t make any promises, but I could see what was going through her mind. We had proved there was no evidence that Auerbauch’s grandson was alive

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and we had found him a descendant he didn’t know he had. It was going to be interesting learning how the old goat would handle all that. I suggested to Christy that we head back to Chiang Mai immediately. We might be able to catch the lateevening plane to Bangkok. We had a lot to tell Auerbauch and I wanted to find and talk to Toy so we could get it all wrapped up. Christy asked a few more questions of the little girl, things that she figured Auerbauch might want to know. One bit of information she got was the girl’s birthday. While she asked a couple of more questions, I stood there counting dates in my head. Toy must have been about three months pregnant when Abe Auerbauch took off for his last flight. Christy almost forgot an important question. She remembered it while we were walking back to the car. ‘‘What’s your name?’’ she asked the girl who was walking beside us. **Abi,’” she answered. We were two excited people driving down the dirt road back toward the highway, both of us talking at once, each stopping to give the other a chance, then both starting again in unison after a moment of silence, like two strangers trying to sidestep each other on a sidewalk. : ‘It’s funny, you know,’’ Christy said. ‘‘If Wilai had written Auerbauch and told him about the great-granddaughter, he might have gotten some kind of finder’s

fee. Now he won’t get a thing.”’ ‘‘What makes you think Auerbauch will even give a

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damn? I haven’t noted any rush by other people to find their bastard grandchildren in Asia. Why would Auerbauch be any different?”’ ‘I think he regrets the one possession he doesn’t have anymore—family. He’s a lonely old man.”’ I laughed at a thought. ‘“‘Next you’ll be telling me he’ll leave that little girl his fortune.”’ *“Why not? Who else is he going to leave it to?’’ The mention of Wilai got her thinking. ‘‘Morgan, should we have left Abi back there? What if Wilai decides to kidnap her or something?”’ ‘*We didn’t have any choice. You don’t just go up to a woman and say, ‘Hi, we’re taking your grandchild.’ Anyway, Wilai probably doesn’t know she exists, or hasn’t figured out she’s Abe Auerbauch’s daughter.”’ _ **But what if the man back in Mai Ai tells him that

we were looking for Toy? What if Wilai goes there and finds the girl?’’ she asked. “If he does, so what? Even Wilai’s smart enough to figure out that now we’ve found Toy and the daughter, it’s over. If anybody is in danger from Wilai, it’s us, at least until we get to a phone and report this all to. Auerbauch.”’ I wished | hadn’t said that. I wouldn’t have started to worry and I wouldn’t have been looking for trouble. I would have never spotted the car that was following us. We picked them up when we reached the highway. They were parked about fifty meters up the road toward Mai Ai. As soon as I pulled onto the highway and turned toward Chiang Mai, I saw through the rear-view mirror

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the man standing beside the yellow sedan jump in on the passenger side. Just before I went around the first curve, the car pulled out and headed our way. The car was there behind us all the way into Chiang Mai. I didn’t want to worry Christy who was having too much fun composing a way to tell Auerbauch about the new relative. I’d pick up speed, then slow down. A good part of the time, the yellow sedan was far enough back that I couldn’t see it as we wound through the mountains. Just about the time I figured I had been imagining a tail that didn’t exist, I’d hit a long straightaway and there he would be, holding at about six hundred meters behind us. For the first fifty kilometers I expected to find logs across

the road every time I went around

a bend, or

have the windshield explode on me again. I must have spotted every potential sniper position we passed, then tensed, waiting for the slug to hit. After two hours of that, I tried to convince myself that they weren’t planning on hitting us, or they would have already done it. I couldn’t be sure they were following us. Maybe it was just some businessman going to Chiang Mai who didn’t like to pass on mountain roads. By the time we hit the outskirts of Chiang Mai, I could feel the sweat soaking my backside. My head ached with the tenseness of constantly being on guard. Inside the city, I pulled a couple of quick turns and cutbacks. I managed to do it without alerting Christy to the fact that we were not going straight to the airline’s downtown office. When I pulled into a parking space at

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Thai Airways, the yellow car was nowhere in sight. I decided it was all an overactive imagination. ““You want to come in while I check and see if we can get on the evening flight?’’ I asked Christy as I turned off the ignition switch. ‘‘Sure, it’s been a long drive.”’ It’s hard to believe that they could fill an entire plane with tourists traveling out of Chiang Mai, but they had. ‘“Well,’’ I said to Christy, who was standing beside me in the airline office, ‘‘our choices are to go out to the airport and hope somebody doesn’t show up, or check into a hotel, call Auerbauch from there, and celebrate our treasure hunt in one of the better restaurants. There’s guaranteed space on the morning flight.’’ ‘*T’m all for the hotel,’’ she said.

The airplanes may have been overbooked, but the hotels weren’t. Thirty minutes later we were standing in the room at the Chiang Inn, unpacking what little lug- gage we had brought. I picked the Chiang Inn because I - knew we could get a room there with big queen-size beds instead of those narrow twin affairs that are too small for comfortable sleeping or robust fucking. It was still too early in the morning in Seattle to get Auerbauch out of bed. I suggested we walk around the night market a bit. I kept looking at the crowd around us while Christy bargained for a couple of dresses with hill-tribe embroidery on the front. I couidn’t see anybody suspicious. Either it had been my imagination or Wilai had more competent people in the north than those he had sent to Pattaya. With the tourist shopping done, I led Christy back to

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the hotel and into its fancy restaurant, the Hilltribe Grill. We ordered smoked salmon and cordon bleu with a good French wine. ‘“‘This really is Never-Never Ean * Christy whispered over the food and the candle between us. “‘Just a few miles away, there are warlords and pirates, Communist armies on the march, hills covered with opium poppies, and hell knows what else. Yet here we sit, washing fine food down with a Cétes du Rh6ne.’’ Her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders. The lights were low and I thought we were both on a high of romance and success. ‘*Never-Never Land?’’ I laughed. ‘‘I always thought this place was more Terry and the Pirates.”’ **No.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘It’s Never-Never Land.”’ ‘‘T hope you don’t think I’m Peter Pan. You can’t be calling me a boy after the kind of lovemaking you and I have been giving each other.”’ ‘*That’s not exactly what I meant. Only I bet in the real story the same thing happened to Wendy. And when it was all over, Wendy flew home and Peter stayed in Never-Never Land just like us.”’ She sipped her wine with a smile that seemed to say she’d caught me. I wasn’t sure whether I liked the way the conversation was going. She giggled. ‘“You’ve even got a Captain Hook, only his name is Wilai, a pirate you take on to amuse yourself, a funny, wicked, incompetent little man who’s not really dangerous.”’ “‘T guess,’’ I said, deciding it was better to get it out in the open, ‘‘we are back on the subject of my life-

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style. I thought I had you convinced it wasn’t such a bad way to live.”’ Her hand snuck across the table and grabbed hold of mine like she was trying to tell me it was a serious conversation, but not an angry one. ‘‘Damn you, but you do make it attractive. Every time you touch me, I get thinking I ought to join up. As for the lovemaking, I never knew | could be so horny so often. I haven’t been able to take my diaphragm out for three days. It’s great, but it isn’t real.” ““What’s real?’’ I asked. ‘‘Is it real working in a government bureaucracy day after day, playing games with humans, claiming what you do benefits humanity, when all those games just screw things up a bit more? Maybe the world would be better off if there were more Peter Pans and fewer Richard Nixons, or Khomeinis, or

Auerbauchs.”’ She was still looking at me like she loved me. ‘‘That’s . what gets to me the most about you,”’ she said. ‘* You’re so damn rational about it all. Intellectually, you've almost got me convinced, but my guts don’t go along.’”’ ‘‘I thought it was supposed to be the other way. I thought you were the intellectual, I was the barbarian.”’ ‘‘Wrong!’’ she almost shouted. “‘You’ve got it all thought out. I’ve made the emotional commitment. I’ve put a lot of sweat into making myself what I am. It hasn’t been easy, especially working for a damn chauvinist like Auerbauch. But even he is treating me like a real person now, not just a broad to be tossed on her back with her skirts thrown over her head.”’ She looked around the grill room, which is designed

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to look like the inside of a hill-tribe home, if they got as much for their opium as the Mafia makes off the dope. She looked back at me. ‘‘I thought I had it licked. Then a week in the tropics with you and I’m acting exactly like the books you men write say I’m supposed to act.’’ She wasn’t making much sense. She was all tied up in all the things they’ve been doing to nice women these days, convincing them that they should copy the worst in men. I had to agree it was emotional, but I didn’t wanted to pursue the argument. ‘‘T think you’re putting yourself down,’’ I said, deciding to blow retreat. ‘‘You’re here with me because you want to be, because it makes you feel good and maybe even because you like yourself a bit more while it’s all happening.” She was still holding my hand and I reached my other hand across to hold both of hers. ‘‘Maybe you’re right,”’ I said. ‘‘Maybe I am Peter Pan. Maybe I never grew up. But if growing up means you have to live like most men, grinding out their days in jobs they don’t like, going home to a box that looks like every other box on the block and a wife who has come home from a job she doesn’t like any better than he likes his, only she won’t admit it, then I’m not going to grow up.”’ ‘‘That brings us right back to where we started,’’ she answered. “‘We’re nuts about each other, but it’s hope-

less. P'1l do what Wendy did. I’ll enjoy the adventure, then I'll fly back home. But that’s not tonight. You know damn well what I want to do tonight.’’ ‘‘So let me sign for the bill and we’ll go up and call Auerbauch first.”’

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e

We decided I’d brief Auerbauch on the proof that Wilai was a fraud and then let Christy take over with the news about Abi. It took about twenty minutes for the hotel operator to get the number in Seattle and Auerbauch’s gruff voice boomed through a satellite and into a hotel room in Chiang Mai. ; ‘Where the hell have you and that broad been?’’ he shouted. “‘I wanted Major Butz dealing with you, not calling me day and night.’’ Shit, I thought. I had been so busy proving Bumper didn’t have a case that I had forgotten Bumper wouldn’t know how to get a hold of us since we left Pattaya and went into hiding. I apologized for the screw-up, then quickly added, ‘‘I hope you haven’t given him any money yet.”’ ‘*Hell no, I haven’t. He’s pushing too hard, like he was afraid he was going to get found out. Has he?’’ ‘‘Absolutely,’’ I answered. I described what we had found out about Wilai and where Auerbauch’s personal effects had been all these years. When I finished, I added, ‘‘I’m sorry, but there is no evidence that your son is alive or ever survived the day of the crash.”’ “‘That’s what I expected, but I had to be sure. One thing, though. You say Abe left those things with a Thai whore, but you haven’t found her yet. How can you be so sure without talking to her?’’ ‘‘T think I would rather let Miss Hammond explain that part of it.’’ I turned and handed the phone to Christy before Auerbauch had a chance to complain. It was a fascinating conversation, even though |

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could hear just one side. It took a lot longer than my conversation and, toward the end, Christy’s part was limited to one- or two-word responses like “‘that’s right,’’ ‘‘absolutely,’’ ‘‘yes, I’m positive,’’ and finally, ‘*as soon as we can, sir.”’ By the time she got off the line, she looked exhausted. She kicked off her shoes and plopped down on the bed before she started filling me in on the details I'd missed. ‘‘He wants us to see the birth certificate; he wants blood tests and any other evidence that will verify that she’s Auerbauch’s natural daughter. He wants me to stay here until it’s done and he wants you to stay on the job until we get it all put together.’ She smiled before she added, ‘‘He says an heir is worth $50,000, so you get the full fee, even though you didn’t find his grandson. But don’t tell him I told you already. I was supposed to wait until all the proof is ins”? ‘*What happens after we get the proof?’’ ‘‘She’s his great-granddaughter. He wants her in the States as soon as we can get her there.”’ ‘*That’s not as easy as it sounds. If we can prove all this to the American consul, she can get an American passport. But what if she doesn’t want to go? What if her mother doesn’t want to let her go?’’ The look on Christy’s face announced that neither Auerbauch nor she had considered the possibility that anyone would not jump at the chance to go to the States. 99

66

‘‘Don’t look like that,’’ I said. ‘‘It may work out, but

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we're working with human beings, not works of art. The first thing we have to do is find Toy. We’ll do that in Bangkok tomorrow. Let’s get to bed. We have to get up early.”’ *‘And you have some things you want to do before you can go to sleep. Right, Peter Pan?’’ **You’re damn right,’’ I said as I flopped down beside her, roughly grabbing her head for a kiss with one hand while my other hand moved up under her skirt. She started to moan as soon as I touched the lips of her pussy. She was ready and I was rock hard. We got just enough of the clothing out of the way to make a clean connection, and Peter Pan was giving Wendy a fucking she would never forget.

We got to the airport at 8:30 A.M. the next morning, an hour before our plane was scheduled to leave. I checked us in. With the boarding passes in my hand, I suggested we get a second cup of coffee in what passed as the airport’s coffee shop. ‘*Do you think we'll have any trouble finding Toy in Bangkok?’’ Christy asked while we waited for the coffee. ‘‘No problem. Boonma gave me her address. We can go over as soon as we get to Bangkok. She probably will get home this morning, too.”’ ‘“You mean she will be on the same plane as us?”’ ‘‘No.’’ I shook my head. ‘‘She more likely took the night train down or one of the tour buses. They all leave in the evening and get to Bangkok in the morning.”’ Our little waitress served the coffee. I took a sip and discovered it was instant. I put the coffee back down 172

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and watched Christy sweeten hers and add the cream. I suppose that makes instant drinkable for some people. The 737 flying up from Bangkok landed about fifteen minutes behind schedule. I paid the bill for the coffee and we walked over to the line of people waiting to go through airport security. The hand-baggage X-ray machine was broken again and we had to stand waiting while a couple of airport employees pawed through every piece of carry-on luggage. There were two tables and my searcher took less time than the one looking through Christy’s purse. While I stood waiting for her to finish I was looking back in a direction that gave me a view through the windows into the parking lot. A yellow sedan pulled up in front and let a passenger out. There was a pole in the lobby that blocked my view and I couldn’t see who was getting out. I was trying to move into position for a better look when Christy got her bag back from the airport employee. Christy picked - up the bag and walked over to me. ‘‘Come on, Morgan. Let’s sit down.’’ I didn’t want her to catch my case of paranoia, so | turned and led her into the waiting room. I found us seats where I could watch the passengers coming off the security check. While I hadn’t gotten much of a look at _ the man who was standing beside the yellow car back on the highway the day before, I might recognize him if I saw him again. A lot of people followed us in. It was going to be a full flight. None of them looked familiar. The loudspeaker announced the boarding call and I started feel-

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ing a whole lot better. Ten minutes later we were in our seats in the no-smoking section at the front of the plane. ‘‘They put the seats closer together on these things than they do in the States,’’ Christy said, watching me try to get my knees comfortably wedged into the short space between me and the seat in front. ‘It’s what you get with monopoly airlines,” I growled. All of the passengers who had been in the waiting room were on the plane, but there were still a couple of empty seats around us. I was starting to relax a bit when three more passengers walked through the front hatch, showing their boarding passes to the hostess. They were standbys, taking the seats left vacant by no-shows. The second in the small group was big for a Thai, almost six feet tall. He looked more like a northern Chinese. He was about thirty-five years old, and his short-sleeved shirt showed the kinds of muscles found on farmers, soldiers, or people that work out a lot. I wasn’t positive, but he looked enough like the man who

had been in the yellow car following us that I talked myself into being convinced he was. This time Christy caught the evidence of sudden concern, even though I tried to hide it. ‘‘Morgan,”’ she said with a voice that told me I rst : better come clean, ‘‘what’s wrong?’’ I turned a bit and watched the tall man find his seat several rows behind us. I turned back to Christy. Something was going sour and I decided J had better let her in on it. | whispered a quick summary of the car and the man.

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‘Are you sure you’re not seeing pirates lurking on the horizon?”’ she asked. I admitted that might be the case, trying to Te it light, which wasn’t easy with her insistence on continuing the Peter Pan and the pirates game. Still, I must have scared her, because when we got back to Bangkok and I was driving us into town, she was twisting around on the seat beside me, trying to see if one of the passengers in the other cars going our way was the man from the airplane ride. She didn’t object when I insisted that she stay in the hotel room while I checked out Toy’s address. I promised to bring Toy back to the hotel so we could both talk to Abe Auerbauch’s old girlfriend. We didn’t expect any trouble getting Toy to listen to us. The address that I had for Toy was in the Supan Kwai area, a maze of twisting lanes off one of the main drags heading toward the airport. It took me forty minutes and several wrong turns before I located the four‘story building with the street number Boonma had provided. Toy lived in apartment 44. A check of the numbering system on the first floor told me that Toy lived on the fourth floor in the last apartment along the corridor. . There wasn’t an elevator and the only set of stairs - looked like a fire escape on a more expensive building. It was bolted to the cement-block structure of the building. Each apartment had one door on the corridor side and one window in the back. An open walkway ran the length of the building on each floor, passing by the four apartments.

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Toy’s money had gone for the house in Mai Ai, not her quarters in Bangkok. The apartment couldn’t be called slum housing; it was what private enterprise in Bangkok rented to people with just enough money to move out of the slums. Once I got to the fourth floor, I stood at the head of the stairs, breathing for a few seconds while I reminded myself that I ought to exercise more often. I walked down the open corridor to number 44. The door didn’t have a knob, just a handle that could be used to pull it shut from the outside. There was a small steel ring on the door and another ring on the jam that matched up so a padlock could be used to keep things safe while the owner was out. A small lock that looked more like what you put on a trunk rather than a front door hung in the open position from one of the rings. Toy was back home. I knocked twice and waited. I thought I heard someone moving about inside, but she either didn’t hear my knock or she wasn’t receiving visitors. I knocked again, louder and longer. Still no answer. I was getting pissed. The third time I hit the door so hard it swung open a couple of inches. I called, ‘‘Toy?’? What the hell, I decided when I didn’t get a response. The news I had was good enough that she’d get over being angry, even if I caught her taking a bath. I walked in. Inside was pretty much the kind of place I expected: a square apartment with a small wall that didn’t go all the way to the ceiling, cutting off a quarter of the room into a separate, smaller room. The door to the little

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room was closed. It would be the bathroom, nothing more than a shower, a wash basin, and a squat toilet. The bed took up about a third of the big room. A two-burner stove stood on a metal table in one corner with a small tank of gas sitting beside it. A cheap plastic wardrobe sat in another corner. Toy wasn’t taking a bath; she was lying on the bed, still wearing the dress she had traveled in. A small suitcase sat in the middle of the floor, open with clothes scattered around it, like somebody had been looking for something. I didn’t think Toy had done the unpacking. Somebody had been waiting for her to come home. ' For a welcome-home gift, they had cut Toy a new mouth. It gave her a gaping red grin an inch below her chin. The bed was soaked with the blood that had emptied through the wound. I didn’t have to feel for a pulse to tell she was dead. If she had been alive, the

blood would have still been pumping onto the bed. I stood there a moment, fighting back the urge to vomit. I considered running for the bathroom to let breakfast go, but I got it under control. I had to get the police. I ran through a quick mental check, trying to remember whether or not I had seen one of the red public phones along the way while I was looking for the address. I knew that none of the neighbors would have phones in that kind of housing. I remembered seeing a ‘police box on a corner. I’d walk back down there. Hopefully, I would be able to get hold of Colonel Pichai on the police radio. I was starting for the door when someone sneezed. It was muffled, like he was trying to choke it back using

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both hands over his mouth, but it was a sneeze, and it

came from behind the bathroom door. The bastard who killed Toy was hiding in there, probably holding the knife he had used on Toy, waiting for me to go through the door. He was going to have a hell of a long wait. I’m no hero, and there was no way I’d volunteer to take on a

man holding a knife, unless I’ve got a weapon that makes loud noises. I didn’t want to let the bastard get away, either. I got a brilliant idea: the padlock hanging on the front door. I could lock the bastard in the room before I started hollering for a cop. He’d be stuck inside with the corpse unless he wanted to try a four-story dive out the one window in the apartment. Congratulating myself on being so clever, I inched toward the door to the outside. The hinges squeaked when I pulled it open. The guy in the bathroom must have remembered the open padlock, too. Whatever, he suddenly decided hiding wasn’t the best tactic. The bathroom door opened in his direction, so I got a bit of a warming before he started his charge, a big kitchen knife held in front of him like he was holding a lance. If I had tried to dodge or get through the door, I would have been dead. I did what he didn’t expect. I charged back, only I dropped and rolled, hitting him at knee level. He fell over the top of me, hit the floor with a bang, and slid into the door, slamming it shut. I continued the roll and bounced to my feet in front of the bed. I felt something sticky on my hand. First I thought he had connected with the knife. I had slid

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through some of Toy’s fresh blood that had dribbled from the bed onto the floor. He was up as soon as I was and facing me. We stood about eight feet apart. He was holding the knife in front, waving it in my direction. I was in deep shit. I figured he had to kill me. I knew who he was, or at least where he worked. It was Wilai’s junior thug, the

shit face with the hairy mole on his chin. I dropped one hand to my belt buckle, holding the other out in front like a boxer’s guard. I started unbuckling the belt, hoping I could get it off before he tried again so I’d have a weapon. He was too close. I didn’t think I'd make it. If it had been anybody but the kind of guy who would work for Wilai, that would have been the signoff for me. Sure, I know it’s possible for a man to disarm someone with a knife, if you regularly train to do it. Even then it’s a fifty-fifty thing. I figured my - chances were about ten to ninety, with me holding the short odds. Hairy Mole didn’t like even those odds. He proved true to the high standard of incompetence that marked the entire Wilai organization. It had been easy cutting up a small woman, and he had probably snuck up from behind to do it. A 220-pound angry man was something he decided not to tangle with. He waved the knife in my direction again, forcing me back as far as I could go, and he bolted, trying to run out the door. He was in such a hurry he forgot it opened in, not out. While he fought the door he had his back turned, and that’s all I needed. I charged across the room, kicking

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my right leg out at the back of his knees and pivoting on my left. I knocked both legs out from under him. He was opening the door when I did it and he fell into the edge of the door with a loud popping sound. He slid down the door to the floor, twisting around as he hit bottom to show a long vertical cut in his forehead that matched the sharp edge of the door. Blood was pouring into his eyes. He had dropped the knife. He pulled himself to his feet and stared through the blood at me standing there with mayhem splashed over my face. The stupid sot turned and tried to get through the door again. I moved in and pounded a right fist into his kidney. He screamed and came around, clawing desperately at my face. I grabbed him by the wrist and whipped him across the room. He collided with the stove and both he and the stove fell to the floor. I was cocky with success and I took my time picking up the knife lying by the door. I even took my eyes off the heap of shit in the corner for a second. I forgot because he was using a knife that every student hoodlum in Thailand carries a pistol of some kind or another. He must have had his stuck in the back of his belt. I guess he hadn’t used it before because he was afraid of the noise bringing a cop on the run. Now he was desperate. It looked like a 9 mm semiautomatic. I had-the

knife. in my hand: and I started for him,

desperately hoping I could get a slice at his wrist before he got the gun on target. I didn’t make it. I saw his fingers tighten on the — trigger as I started my slash with the knife. I wondered if I would feel the bullet hit or hear the sound of

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the gun. It didn’t happen. It was his last fuck-up. He had forgotten to take off the safety. That only takes a flick of the thumb and he almost made it before I connected with my swing, catching his wrist right behind the pistol with the knife blade. He . still managed to fire the gun, but the force of the knife had pushed it enough to the side that the slug only scared the shit out of me as it passed by my left ear. The knife had cut the tendons in his wrist and he dropped the gun. It should have been over, but the adrenaline and the anger had pushed me over the edge. I was crazy mad. I was mad at incompetent crooks who screwed up iives and emotions. I was mad at idiots who killed women to hide crimes that had already been uncovered. I was mad that I wasn’t going to get to tell a pretty lady that an old love affair was going to pay sudden dividends to her and her daughter. I was mad that an incompetent son of a bitch like the sniveling ‘creature in front of me could scare the shit out of me. I moved forward. Hairy Mole was sitting up, facing me, but blinded by the blood from the wound

on his

head. He was slobbering in fright and frustration. I knelt in front of him and grabbed him by the hair, jerking his face up, exposing his throat. The bastard would have been dead meat, but those seven long hairs hanging down from the mole on his chin saved his life. For some reason, seeing them on that pathetic face broke the murderous concentration driving me. I always wondered why Chinese men with moles that grew hair insisted on letting the hairs grow long, dan-

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gling from their faces. It must have something to do with fertility or luck, or some such shit. Seeing that silly symbol of the part of the Orient I'll never understand reminded me of something I had always wanted to do to one of those hairy moles. I let go of the hair on top of his head and, grabbing the hair coming out of the mole, I pulled his chin forward and up. I leaned over and cut the mole hairs off, taking the top part of the mole with them. He passed out from fright, pain, frustration, and terror. I stood up, tossed the hairs and the piece of mole in the direction of Toy’s corpse, and walked to the door. Outside the apartment, I saw a small crowd was already gathering down at the head of the stairs, attracted by the gunshot and the noisy fight. I wasn’t going to have to call for a cop. The man in the police box down the street had heard the shot and I could see him running up the street toward us. Most of the other people in the street down below were either looking in my direction or coming my way. All except one man. He was a tall, muscular fellow, ~ walking away from the building. I couldn’t see his face, but I was sure I knew who he was. I wondered if he had followed me, or if he was already there when I arrived. He got into a blue sedan parked in the lane and I watched it drive away.

‘Khun Maakan, you meanest bastard I ever know.”’ Colonel Pichai just walked into his own office. I had been sitting there for over two hours. The wait in his office had been a lot more comfortable than the five

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hours I°d spent in the Supan Kwai police station waiting for Pichai to get back from some ceremony at the palace. Once he found out the police were holding me, he

drove out and suggested to the local cops that I might be telling the truth when I claimed it was the hysterical Thai citizen with the blood dripping from his head and his wrist who killed the woman, not the mad farang. After that, he had arranged to have me wait in his office at central headquarters rather than the Supan Kwai jail cell. Pichai was followed into his office by one of the staff carrying a red folder with a bunch of papers. Pichai dismissed the aide, then looked at me. He switched to

Thai. ““His name is Chaisuk. He’s got a record for theft and a couple of other petty crimes. I’m surprised he got _it up for murder, but he’s confessed. I told him I'd give him back to you if he didn’t tell us everything he knows.”’ ‘Did he implicate Wilai Phaksabai?’’ I asked. ‘Immediately. Chaisuk claims that Wilai called him from Mai Sai two days ago and told him to find Toy and make sure she didn’t talk to you or anyone else. He’s been waiting at her apartment ever since.”’ A woman with the usual cups of coffee came in and served us both. I had been there often enough that they served mine black without asking me. “‘We have already picked up Somsuk and those two who followed you to Pattaya. One’s confessed to shoot-

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ing at you from a hill above the highway. We’ve sent orders to Mai Sai to find Wilai and put him in jail.’’ ‘“Why did they have to kill her?’’ I asked. ‘‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to pay her off?”’ ‘*Wilai’s crew doesn’t have that kind of money. Chaisuk was supposed to scare her. He wasn’t very scary and she laughed at him.”’ All that time I had been waiting for Pichai, I had been worrying about the little girl, Abi, wondering if she was in danger from our idiot band of murderous clowns. I asked Pichai about it. ‘*Somsuk claims nobody knew anything about a girl in Mai Ai. They didn’t even know that’s where Toy was from. Somsuk bought the things that belonged to the pilot from her here in Bangkok.”’ It was all neatly tied together, except for one thing. ‘‘What about the man who’s been following me, the other guy I saw at the house?”’ Pichai picked up the red folder, opened it, and scanned through a few pages. “‘You mean the man you said you ‘thought’ you saw. None of these people know anything about anybody else. I believe them. Somsuk doesn’t want to be part of a double feature when we execute Chaisuk. I think you’ve got an overactive imagination.’’ Maybe Pichai was right. I hadn’t been positive, just almost.- But I was wearing out my welcome with an old friend. I decided not to push it. Pichai hadn’t been very happy earlier when he found out how much I hadn’t been telling him all along, especially the attempt on our lives on the way back from Pattaya. He hinted it was my fault the woman was dead.

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He took a couple of sheets of paper out of the folder and put them on the low coffee table in front of the plastic-covered couch I was sitting on. He asked me to read them and to sign the last page. After that, I was free to go, provided I didn’t leave Thailand until after the trial. Before I walked out, Pichai asked me one more question. ‘‘What about the girl up there in Mai Ai, the one you say this Mr. Auerbauch wants to take to the United States? Do you want me to have a policeman drive up and tell her and Toy’s parents what happened?”’ I asked him to let me handle that. Auerbauch would still want the girl in the States, so Christy and I would

have to go back anyway and have a long talk with the grandparents. Besides, I had to admit Pichai could be right—I did have some guilt I wanted to dump. Breaking the news to the little girl about her mother would be _a way of doing it. I asked Pichai to make arrangements to have Toy’s body held on ice until I could find out how her parents wanted to handle the cremation. I was about ready to leave when I remembered one more thing. ‘‘What happened to Bumper Butz? Somebody has to tell him it’s been a fraud all along.”’ ‘‘Bumper has disappeared. We have reason to believe he is in Nakorn Phanom, up on the Mekong River. He’s trying to mount a one-man rescue mission into Laos.”’ ‘‘We have to stop him. There is no evidence he will find anybody there. He’ll just get himself killed,’’ I said.

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‘‘We will stop him,’’ Pichai told me. “‘If we can find him. I think he’s been watching too much Rambo.”’ After Pichai had showed up at the Supan Kwai police station, they had let me call Christy at the hotel, so all I had to do was update the latest information when I got back to the room. ‘‘We’re going back to Chiang Mai in the morning?”’ she asked. ‘‘Not in the morning. I want to go by the consulate section at the embassy first and find out what we need in the way of documentation to prove the girl’s claim to U.S. citizenship.” I called the airline and made reservations on a flight leaving at 2:30 P.M. I figured that would give us lots of time to deal with bureaucracy in the barricaded gray ~ American embassy over on Wireless Road. The reservations taken care of, I called room service and ordered something to eat. I ate half of it while taking off my clothes. I climbed into my side of the double bed Christy and I were sharing and went to sleep. The next morning, Christy went with me to the embassy. We had been optimistic about the efficiency of bureaucracy. It took us four hours to get in to see a consular officer, even after I had called and asked Steve to help. Once we got to see her, she made it clear she didn’t approve of the new legislation that made it so easy for a child to establish American citizenship ‘‘just because some prostitute got careless with a GI here to fight what was really their war.’’ After Christy blew out a steam valve, the prissy woman did give us a lengthy

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explanation about what we would have to show to prove that Abi qualified. By the time we got back to the hotel to pick up our bags and check out, it was too late to make our flight. I also had a message at the front desk telling me to call Colonel Pichai. I asked Christy to check with the travel desk and see if she could get.us on a later flight. I called Pichai from the room, wondering what was wrong. *‘T wanted to let you know,”’ he said when he came on the line, ‘“we missed Wilai. He’s still on the loose.”’ I thanked Pichai for the word, promised to be careful, and told him that I hoped they caught the little shit in a hurry. I had revised my opinion about how dangerous Wilai might be. Even the incompetent can make you dead. Christy came into the room just as I hung up. I told her about the call and asked how she had done with the reservations. ‘*The earliest I could get was 6:30 this evening.”’ That put us into Chiang Mai well after dark. Christy _ still wanted to drive up to Mai Ai that evening rather than wait for the next morning. ‘*Sweetheart,’’ I argued, ‘‘you’ve never tried to drive a country road in this part of the world at night. There are trucks parked for repairs on the highway with no lights, drunk drivers, tour buses with drivers paid by the trip, not the hour, and potholes you can hide in. I would just as soon gamble Russian style with a five-shot revolver. I don’t want to get killed delivering bad news.

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We’ll get a hotel for tonight and go up early in the morning.”’ We checked into the Chiang Inn again. Before we went in to dinner, I dropped by a rental car office on the mezzanine and reserved a car for the next morning. I told the sweet-voiced little lady behind the counter I wanted the car out in front at 7:00 A.M. sharp. She promised me with a smile that made me feel ten years younger that I didn’t have a thing to worry about. That wasn’t the first time a pretty girl has lied to me, but it still hurts when they do. The car wasn’t in front when we checked out the next morning and nobody was behind the rental desk upstairs. I tried calling both Hertz and Avis but couldn’t get an answer that early. ‘“Why don’t we hire a taxi?’’ Christy asked. ‘‘Auerbauch will pay for it.’’ It was interesting that she was playing more free with the old man’s money, but that wasn’t a solution. “It’s almost impossible to find a real taxi in this town. All the vehicles for hire are those open pickup trucks with the seats in the back. They’re hot, dusty, and dangerous.”’ Ten minutes later I was about to go the baht-bus route when the car we had ordered finally showed up. The kid who drove it into the hotel parking lot swore he had been told he should be there at 9:00 A.M. We finally got on our way two hours later than planned. Thirty miles north of Chiang Mai, the engine stopped. One second we were doing eighty kilometers an hour, the next I was coasting to the side of the road, swearing at myself and all things Asian.

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“Give it a try!’ I hollered twenty minutes later from the front of the car. Christy turned the key, pumped the gas, and the car caught. She gunned the motor a couple of times to keep it running until I could close the hood, run around, and slide in as she climbed over the gearshift back to the passenger side. Behind the wheel, I buckled up, pumped the gas a couple of times, and pulled back onto the highway. ‘‘What was the problem?’’ she asked. *“‘l’m not sure. I kept wiggling wires and linkage until something worked.”’ She laughed. “‘I thought that was the way we women fixed things, not you big macho men.”’ I was pissed enough with the problems we were having that I ignored the remark and concentrated on the driving, hoping to regain some of the time we had lost. The closer we got to Mai Ai, the more I worried about how I was going to break the news to Abi about her mother. The next problem was pure Freudian. I missed the turnoff. I didn’t realize I had done it until we rounded a bend and found the town of Mai Ai right in front of us. By the time I got turned around, back to the turnoff, and up the winding dirt road to the village, it was past noon. My stomach was growling with hunger and Christy and I were taking turns bitching at each other. I knew something was wrong as soon as we pulled up and parked in front of the house that Toy had built for her parents. We didn’t get an instant crowd. There were

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a few people, mostly women and children outside the other huts in the village, all doing the variety of odd jobs that Third-World farm families do every day. Everyone studiously ignored us, like they were embarrassed we were there. One half-naked kid playing in the yard on the other side of the road started in our direction, but a woman ran out and grabbed him, shouting something in the local dialect I couldn’t understand. We both got out of the car and walked together up to the front door of the house. This time a man was there, probably Toy’s father. He was dressed in northern Thai country-style clothes, wearing a shirt and pants made out of cheap cotton cloth died with indigo. The shirt had no collar and blue cloth strings tied in little bows instead of buttons. He wore a dirty blue-checkered cloth tied around his waist like a sash. Toy’s mother was standing behind him inside the house. He was older than she was and he had about half as many teeth. He had one thing over the old lady—he could speak passable central Thai. I didn’t want to have to tell bad news twice, so I asked him where his granddaughter was. ‘“‘Abi not here. She run away. She bad girl like mother.’”’ He was frowning when he told me, but I couldn’t tell whether he was angry or frightened. I tried again, tell-

ing him it was important. I told him there was a lot of money involved, but that we needed to talk to the girl. ‘‘Abi not here. She never come back. She go away. You go away, too.”’

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As far as he was concerned, the conversation was over. He started to turn around, like he was going back into the house. I still had something else that had to be said. I hollered for him to wait, then told him that his daughter Toy was dead. I told him where the body was, and what he should do if he wanted to arrange the cremation. I was mad and | said it brutally. It didn’t have the effect I expected. He turned back and stood there staring at me. His face didn’t change; there was no sudden surprise or sorrow. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he already knew.

He listened; he understood; he didn’t

say anything. I still wasn’t satisfied, but I didn’t have a gun to threaten him with, so I grabbed Christy by the hand and started back to the car. Along the way I translated what the old man had told me. ‘*Morgan!’’ she was shouting when we reached the - car. ‘‘We can’t leave. We have to find out what hap-. pened to that little girl.”’ ‘‘That’s exactly what we are going to do, but we need reinforcements. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner we’ll be back with someone who can give that pimping farmer what he deserves.”’ I jerked open the door, pushed her inside, ran around, jumped in my side, and started the engine. I shoved the gearshift forward into first and spun the tires in the dust getting out of there. I thought 1 had a pretty good idea what had happened to Abi. I couldn’t think of a reason why I should keep it

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a secret from Christy. ‘“That bastard sold that little girl. That’s what that shit of a grandfather has done.’’ I heard Christy gasp beside me. She didn’t have to have it explained. She didn’t want to believe me either. “*Sold her? His own granddaughter? That’s impossible. She’s too young.”’ ‘It happens all the time, even to twelve-year-olds. They bring premium prices. She won’t be the first girl to lose her cherry before her first period.”’ ‘*But what was he going to tell Toy when she came back to see her daughter? He didn’t know Toy was going to get killed.”’ ‘‘Toy may have agreed with the idea,’’ I suggested. *“Why not? The same thing probably happened to her when she was Abi’s age.”’ ‘*Morgan, I don’t care what happened to Toy when she was that age. I’m not going to call Auerbauch and tell him that his only living relative is working in a whorehouse someplace in Thailand. We have to find her. ‘I told you that’s what we’re going to do,’’ I assured her. ‘“Whatever it takes, we’ll find her.”’ We ran into a cloud of dust hanging over the road that a car or truck in front was throwing back at us. I turned my attention to my driving, looking through the dust for a chance to catch up and pass whoever it was. It was that damn baht bus.

XI.

I knew what a bear in a cage felt like. I was the village attraction. Every kid over the age of six months and most of their mothers had surrounded me right after the sun got its start on the day. They watched me eat the ‘basket of sticky rice and the dish of vegetable curry the guard had passed through the bamboo bars. They watched me squirm around trying to find a comfortable position. Each new move on my part brought laughs, funny jokes I couldn’t understand, and long explanations from a couple of old crones who quickly established themselves as the experts on the behavior of the round-eyed

animal that had been left for their entertainment. The highlight of the morning’s fun happened my bladder pressure hit the red line. I used the in full view of my admiring public, even though tempted to aim through the bars at the two old

when bucket I was ladies. 193

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After my little performance showed them what I had,

the two crones added a whole new set of hand signals to their repertoire. The choice of the crowd was the one where the hags would hold their two palms a good foot apart while they grimaced in fake pain and gyrated their scrawny hips under the dirty sarongs they were wearing. Fortunately, someone still thought I was dangerous enough to merit a full-time guard who enjoyed the authority that went with keeping people from poking sticks or throwing rocks and dirt at me. Other than the guard, no one else in a uniform was paying any attention to me. From what I could see, it was a pretty sorry military organization. My guard’s uniform was faded khaki that had been washed uncounted times, but never ironed. A smoke-blackened field cap sat on top of a thatch of hair spilling halfway to his shoulders. He was wearing old-fashioned black tennis shoes with toes sticking out on the right foot. His weapon, with large rust spots on the barrel, was a World War I bolt-action Mauser. There were a few other jungle soldiers wandering around the village or standing guard at other points during the day. None of them looked any better than the one in front of my cage. The variety of firearms they were carrying around, mostly over their shoulder with a hand gripping the barrel, included a few M-16s, several AK-47s, a dozen M-1s, several shotguns, and at least one Remington 30-06. Ammunition supply would be a real nightmare for whoever was in command of the ragged little group. I couldn’t see anything that hinted at where they were

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holding Christy. My best guess was the large building in the center of the camp that looked like a headquarters. I hadn’t heard any screams or sounds of fighting, so I had hopes that the rape hadn’t started yet. There wasn’t much I could do, so I winked at a dirty-faced girl of about fourteen who had inched a bit closer than most of the crowd, mostly so she could flirt with the guard. She saw the wink, screamed, and fled into the crowd, giving everyone else another belly laugh. Having lived up to the high standards of entertainment that my public expected, I retired to a corner and sat down, hoping if I didn’t move too much, it would be dark before I was forced into another demonstration of my marksmanship with the bucket. The guard fed me three meals, kept the water gourd filled, and emptied the bucket once. That and the crowd made up my day. When the sun finally surrendered, the night proved even longer and more tedious. At one point I did try wiggling a couple of the bars apart. The --guard stopped that when he woke up, saw what I was doing, and made a try at mashing my fingers with the butt end of his gun. By morning the next day, the sweat on my clothes had fermented to a ripe high and I could feel the fungus growing in my crotch. Breakfast was no improvement, and I was losing my audience to more ordinary pursuits like games of tops and village gossip. It must have been about 10:30 when they arrived. It was a squad-size group on foot led by a man riding a horse. Two men in the squad were out in front as a point. As soon as they were inside the village perime-

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ter, about half the group spread out in basic defense positions. The rest of them and the man on the horse passed in front of my cage on their way to the building I had already decided was the headquarters. I had been in the hands of slobs, but the real professionals had arrived. Their jungle fatigues still showed the press, even though they obviously had been on the march for several hours. They were all wearing U.S.style tropical boots that looked right off a supply sergeant’s shelf. Each man was wearing a red beret set at exactly the same angle as every other man in the squad. What surprised me the most was the weaponry. Each man had exactly the same rifle. I had to look twice to make sure they were what I thought: factory-fresh SAR-80s, an excellent but inexpensive assault rifle made in Singapore that was only supposed to be in the hands of the Singapore armed forces. Anybody who could make the connection to buy those kinds of weapons for his troops was a warlord on the way up. That wasn’t the biggest surprise. The leader on the horse was. I’d seen him before, getting on a plane in Chiang Mai and leaving the scene of the crime in Bangkok. I was positive. On his way past my cage, he reined in and turned to stare at me for a second, a thin smile breaking through the rock-hard muscles of his face. He was close enough so I could read the neat red stitching on one pocket that announced the warlord force he was part of: SIRA. I knew what the letters stood for. Steve Austin had mentioned them one time over some drinks. It was the newest heroin-trafficking group, the one led by the mystery man, Ap Aue Pak.

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As I watched him dismount and go into the headquarters building, followed by three of his men, I wondered if I had just seen Ap Aue Pak, and what he could possibly want with Christy and me. Less than five minutes after he had gone into the building, he came marching back out and headed in my _ direction, followed by the one-eyed leader of the group - that had captured us. He stopped in front of my cage. ‘“‘T understand your name is Morgan Adams. I’m Colonel Sao Tai. I’m the chief of staff of the Shan Independent Revolutionary Army.”’ I wouldn’t have called his English perfect. I don’t think the British speak perfect English. His sounded right out of Sandhurst Military Academy. ‘*T regret that we did not have our own troops in this area,’’ he explained. “‘One sometimes must use allies of less than acceptable competence.”’ He looked back at the one-eyed bastard who had ’ given me such a headache. The man didn’t look nearly as mean in front of the SIRA officer as he had on the trail. The colonel turned in my direction, frowning. “If I can have your word that you will not attempt any more summary castrations, I’ll be happy to let you out and lead you to a bath and a change of clothes.”’ I suppose I should have showed him how brave I was by telling him to fuck himself, but the promise of the smell of soap was too much. I nodded my agreement. Twenty minutes later, I was squeaky clean and wearing a set of clean fatigues I had found hanging in the wooden shed where I had taken my bath. The pants fit

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me around the waist, but the legs ended six inches above my shoe tops. After the bath, two guards led me to a room in one of the bigger buildings and left me alone. Five minutes later, the door opened and somebody let Christy in. She looked fine, no signs of torn clothing or any other evidence of damage. She had been given a pair of fatigues, too. Hers fit fine at the ankles, but the buttons holding the top half of the shirt closed were under severe stress. ’ **Morgan,’ was all she said at first, then she was across the room, into my arms, and sobbing all the usual clichés. I] asked the obvious question. ‘‘ You okay?”’ ‘ve been frantic worrying about you. You looked so bad when they dumped you into that cage. I kept trying to talk someone into letting me see you, but nobody speaks English.”’ ‘‘T’m glad all they did was lock you up. I was afraid you were in for a hard time.”’ ‘‘They fed me, and they left me with a television set and a VCR. All the movies were Chinese sword epics.”’ I didn’t tell her about the swell entertainment she could have been watching out in the village square. ‘“Morgan, why are we here? Who are these people?’’ I told her what I knew and added, ‘‘I can’t figure it out; it doesn’t make sense.’’ Before I could say anything else, the door swung open and Colonel Sao Tai walked in. Now was the time to be brave. After all, a pretty girl was watching.

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*‘What the hell is the meaning of all this?’’ I shouted at him. ““You’ve made some kind of mistake and you had better start correcting it.’’ ‘Believe me, Mr. Adams,’’ he said with a voice smothered in ice cubes. ‘‘The SIRA never makes mistakes. You have. My commander is not sure exactly what your mistakes were, but he’s going to find out.”’ *“You’re nuts. What could we have possibly done to you? | want an explanation.”’ ““You may get it, if Ap Aue Pak wants you to. It’s up to him. We leave immediately.’’ Two of his men carrying their SARs at the ready came into the room and killed any thoughts I might be _ having of not leaving, too. We followed the colonel out to the parade ground, where one of his men was holding the horse he had ridden in on. They had hired or stolen two other horses. The horses had saddles made of wood on their backs and bridles made of woven rope. Sao Tai walked

over

and checked

his horse,

then

turned back and looked at Christy and me. ‘‘General Ap Aue Pak has a camp about six hours from here. You two have a choice of riding those two horses sitting up or tied across the saddles.’’ We rode sitting up, heading out of the camp. Judging from the sun, we rode north for quite a ways, then more ‘to the northeast and east. I did what I could to keep track of the geography in case we got a sudden chance to run for the Thai border. The jungle started to get thicker. We were swatting mosquitos and dodging vines and bamboo that crowded the trail. The worst danger was the occasional thorn

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trees, some of them with trunks a yard wide, the yellow-

brown bark covered with black-tipped thorns that stretched an inch or more from their fat base to the needle point. Christy was riding behind me and no one seemed to object if we talked to each other. ‘‘Morgan,’’ she whispered when she thought that Sao Tai was far enough ahead that he wouldn’t hear. ‘‘Do you think Wilai arranged all this?’’ ‘‘Not a chance,’’ I guessed. ‘‘I can’t imagine that stupid shit working out a deal with these kind of people.”’ ‘Then why is it happening?’’ I wished I could give an answer. Nothing made sense. I couldn’t think of any way the SIRA could be tied in with what we had been doing, not to Wilai, not to Toy and her daughter, and certainly not to a missing pilot named Abe Auerbauch. It had been years since I had done any serious horseback riding. After two hours I was in constant pain, continually shifting my weight in the stirrups, trying to ease my screaming thigh muscles. At first I began to wonder if I was going to faint before the trip ended. At last I started to worry that I wouldn’t. Hate’s a good way to get your mind off pain. I hated the warlord Ap Aue Pak. I couldn’t figure out why, but he was the one responsible for our pain. Steve had told me that nobody had a picture of him. He was the phantom of the Golden Triangle. I tried to imagine what Ap Aue Pak would look like, but I couldn’t come up with a face that deserved as much rage as was boiling out of me. The face that did keep floating to the surface was the flabby, crooked face of Wilai. I wondered what

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had happened to him. He was probably on the run. | decided it was likely I would never see him again. I was making a habit of being wrong. When we got to the place the colonel was taking us, Wilai was there to greet us. We rode around a bend in the road and there he stood beside the trail, about a hundred yards ahead. His arms were outstretched as if waiting to give us all a big hug. From the distance, it looked like he was wearing a safari suit made from reddish-brown cloth. He was standing right in front of a tall tree shading the trail twenty yards before it entered a jungle military camp. As we rode closer | started to wonder about those outstretched arms. He couldn’t be that happy to see us. The way he was holding them looked uncomfortable, only he didn’t let them down. A little bit closer and I could see Wilai’s problem. He couldn’t let his arms down. His hands and his wrists were nailed to low branches on each side of the tree in - back of him. He wasn’t standing; he was hanging, his bare toes three inches off the ground. It wasn’t an ordinary tree either. It was the biggest thorn tree I had ever seen. A little bit closer and I could see that the reddish-brown color of his clothes was drying blood. He wasn’t dead. His mouth was open and he was screaming. Only all we could hear was a raspy squeak. His vocal cords had given out before his heart would. I heard someone vomiting behind me. I didn’t have to look back to know it was Christy. After we passed Wilai, the trail zigzagged the last twenty yards through a system of trenches and what |

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knew had to be mine fields. The camp was larger than I had thought at first, largely because considerable effort had been taken to hide it from the air, or at least make it look like a small hill-tribe village. The SIRA troops I could see once we were in the camp looked as good as the colonel’s escort—simple but neat fatigue uniforms, alert looks, and good weaponry. As we moved through the camp, the soldiers would sharply snap to attention as the colonel passed by. The colonel led us. to the largest building, one made of solid wood construction with a cement foundation. It had a full porch and a small parade ground in front. The colonel dismounted and told us to do the same. I slid off my horse, groaning as I tried to introduce my knees to each other. Christy looked in better shape than I did. Her horse looked in a lot better shape than the one I had been riding. The colonel talked for a few moments with one of the men who was standing in guard position in front of the building. I couldn’t be sure, but what they were speaking sounded like a Chinese dialect. The colonel motioned to some wooden chairs sitting around a small coffee table on the porch. ‘*Please sit down and make yourselves comfortable. We expect General Ap Aue Pak back in a short time.’ I took Christy’s arm and led her up the porch steps toward the chairs. The colonel turned and walked away, leaving us alone with two guards standing at the porch entrance. I was looking at Christy, hoping to cheer her up a bit,

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so I didn’t pay much attention to the small female who came out of the house carrying a tray with cakes and coffee. I was about to suggest to Christy that things couldn’t be that bad if they were serving us sweets with the coffee, when her face fell apart. That’s the only way I can describe it. No actor ever ' quite gets the knack of faking total and sudden surprise. Most of us seldom get to watch someone who gets a serious, unexpected surprise for real. I turned to see what it was that had stunned Christy and got my own surprise. The little girl was kneeling in front of the table, slipping the two cups of coffee off her tray. She carefully placed one in front of Christy, then the other in front of me. It was Toy’s daughter, Abi. She might be doing a servant’s job, but she had made a sudden jump up the social ladder. Her blouse and sarong were black, like she was in mourning, but it looked like silk cloth. She -had small gold bracelets on each wrist and a gold chain around her neck with a large diamond pendant. She finished serving the cakes, then stood up, giving us the traditional wai greeting. Christy recovered first. ‘*Abi, what are you doing here?’’ ‘‘T live here. This is my home now that my mother is dead,’’ she said in her schoolgirl English. I had already decided the black meant she had learned about her mother, but damned if I could figure out how. ‘‘Do you know what happened to your mother?’’ I asked.

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‘Yes, I am very sad. The general tells me that the song sung by the man who ordered her death will help my mother find a better life in the next world. I listened to his song last night, and I know the general is right.”’ She said it looking at me with a little smile under the nose that was a little bit too big for her pretty Asian face. If I had been in doubt before, watching that smile while she talked about poor Wilai screaming through the night would have convinced me that she was Auerbauch’s offspring. She gave us another wai and a bow. ‘‘Please excuse | me now. I must go get ready. The general will be back in a little while.’’ She walked back into the building, leaving two stunned people sitting there. ‘““My God!’’ Christy groaned. ‘‘They sold that little — girl to a heroin warlord. What are we going to do now?’ Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t figure out how to say it to Christy without getting her mad. Abi had been upset about her mother, but she didn’t seem upset about being in a warlord’s house. There had been pride in her voice when she announced it was her home. The way she said ‘‘the general’? sounded more like the way an older woman will speak the name of a lover, or a younger child would talk about a parent. All I could think of to say was, ‘‘Let’s hope they didn’t bring us here because they think we had anything to do with Toy’s death.”’ Someplace in the camp, a band started to play. It was the ‘“‘Washington Post March,’’ played like Sousa would have wanted it. A twenty-man drum-and-bugle corp

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came marching through the camp in perfect step. They marched into the parade ground in front of us, following a drum major carrying a British-style baton. The other soldiers in the camp assembled in formation on the parade ground in front of the porch. The formation was perfect and Colonel Sao Tai was in the front. I heard a whistle someplace off in the jungle and the band switched to ‘‘Hail to the Chief.’”’ Whoever Ap Aue Pak was, he had real pretensions to glory. He came out of the jungle from the north end of the camp, riding a horse and leading several other men on horseback. They were followed by more soldiers on foot. It was a fucking parade. I wondered if the warlord got this kind of treatment every time he came back to base, or if it was put on special for Christy and me. Abi had come out of the house and was standing there, waiting for the general. One of the sentries noticed that Christy and I were still sitting in our chairs,

_and he motioned wildly for us to stand. We did, but I was damned if I was going to snap to attention for a drug trafficker, even if he was. . .

Sweet mother on a crutch, I said to myself. I didn’t have to look at Christy. I knew she would be wearing that stupid look again, the one she used to tell the world she was surprised. I was, too. I knew who the general was. He had changed a lot since the last picture had been taken, put on a small paunch and wrinkles around the eyes, but I coula still recognize him. The general stopped and swung off his horse. The entire command saluted in unison. The colonel stepped

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up and exchanged a few remarks with his chief of staff. Then the general walked to the porch. He stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting until Abi ran forward and gave her father a hug. With everybody’s attention focused on the general and his daughter, I figured I could risk whispering a bit to Christy. ‘‘My God, it was there all along, right out in the open, only I didn’t recognize it.”’ Christy didn’t say anything; she was too busy staring at a man she thought had been dead for thirteen years. Nobody had looked in our direction, so I kept on whispering. ‘“The name, he kept his own name, only he started pronouncing it Chinese style.”’ - Christy looked at me, letting me know with a frown that she still didn’t understand. “If you take Abe Auerbauch and pronounce it like an Oriental language,’’ I explained, ‘‘it comes out Ap Aue Pak.”’ J. J. Auerbauch’s grandson let go of his little girl and walked over in our direction. He didn’t look very

happy. “*T don’t know if I’m going to throw a party to thank you people for finding me a daughter I didn’t know I had, or if I’m going to hang you beside that turd outside the camp.”’ I didn’t know what to say. Two days ago, I had the puzzle nice and neatly solved, except for a couple of extra pieces that didn’t seem to belong in the same box. Now I was trying to rebuild the puzzle around those odd pieces.

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The general turned back to his command and motioned with his hand. Somebody in one of the front lines shouted an order and they all stood down, returning to whatever they had been doing when the band started to play. The band stayed in formation and marched in the direction from which they had come, playing ‘‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.”’ Abe Auerbauch motioned the two of us to sit down, and he took one of the remaining chairs. Abi disappeared inside, then came back with a bottle of Hennessy VSOP and three glasses. Both Christy and I accepted the offer. I didn’t know about Christy, but I wanted the brandy badly. Auerbauch took his time with the first sip from the large round snifter, then started asking questions. ‘*Let’s start with you telling me why you’ve been showing my picture all over the countryside, and how that ended up getting a girl I used to know suddenly dead.”’

- Christy and I were on trial. I didn’t try to hide anything. I started at the beginning back in Seattle with his grandfather and Bumper Butz. Auerbauch would ask a question, but didn’t let me ask any. Even so, it was all very friendly and chatty, Abi appearing whenever a brandy glass needed refilling. Abe Auerbauch would make a comment once in a while. He liked to brag. As we talked, he said enough to fill in a few holes in my own understanding. Abe had never known he had a daughter living so close to his jungle headquarters. The district official, like a lot of other Thai officials, was on the SIRA payroll. He had

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seen Auerbauch, whom he knew as Ap Aue Pak, a couple ' of times. That’s why he turned into mango chutney when he saw the picture I showed him. I had been wrong; he had recognized the man in the picture, not Toy. The deputy district officer sent a message to Sao Tai who had been in the area on some business and Sao Tai started looking into what we were doing. Another man checked out Ban La Mai and discovered the girl about the time Sao Tai was watching the fun in Supan Kwai. They kept Auerbauch informed of it all by radio. When he learned he had a daughter, he had ordered her brought to his carnp. ‘‘T’ve got agents in every town in northern Thailand,”’ Auerbauch told us at one point. “‘We knew there was an order out for the arrest of Wilai before the Mai Sai chief of police did. I was looking forward to seeing Toy again. When | found out Wilai had ordered her killed to try and cover up his little fraud game, I decided he belonged to me, not Thai justice.”’ By the third brandy, Christy and I had explained most of our part in it all several different times. When we were finished, Auerbauch smiled. He had one of those smiles that could scare the shit out of you. ‘*So the old man wanted to raise my daughter?’’ he said when we were finished with our explanations. ‘‘It’s too bad that one-eyed idiot Sao Tai hired to watch that village decided I would want to see you.”’ ‘“You mean you didn’t order us kidnaped?”’ ‘Hell no! It would have been a lot better if the girl

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had just disappeared. Like I did. The old man could have croaked with a double mystery.”’ It was already almost dark. Somewhere in the distance I heard a diesel engine start up, and the lights went on. Christy asked the next question. ‘‘I don’t understand. Why don’t you want the girl to go live with your grandfather?’’ She looked around the camp and shuddered. “‘You can’t expect her to stay with you here.”’ Auerbauch stood up. *‘Why not? I’m going to build a whole new empire in the Shan States. She’ll be the reigning princess. Thanks to a case of the mumps in that fucking Vietnamese prison camp, Ill never have anybody else to leave it all to.”’ It was the first time Auerbauch had made any reference to his own history over the last thirteen years even though Christy had tried to ask a few questions. He turned and walked toward the door of the building. On the way he said something to one of the guards - till standing in front of the porch. Then he turned back toward us. ‘‘We’re going to have a party this evening to celebrate the return of my daughter. You’re invited. The guards will show you to your quarters so you can change.”’ As the guards led us across the compound, I wondered what I was going to change into. I hadn’t seen anybody in the camp, even Sao Tai, who would have clothes to lend that would be my size. They put us each in a different hut. My quarters were in a rough-cut wooden bungalow about fifty yards from where we had talked to Auerbauch. There was a small

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porch and a bedroom with a primitive bathroom attached. The building was unpainted, but it looked solid. The windows had wooden shutters but no glass or screen. The bed in the middle of the room had a mosquito net draped over it. There was a wooden chest of drawers and a small table. The table had a Thermos of hot water, some cups, and a little jar of tea. My watch and the money that One-eye and his boys had stolen were sitting on the top of the chest of drawers. The only thing that was still missing was my folding Buck knife. A suitcase and a briefcase were sitting in the corner. They were mine. The briefcase had ; been on the back seat of the car when we were kidnaped. I had left the suitcase in the hotel in Chiang Mai. I opened one of the drawers. My clothes were neatly stacked inside. In the bathroom, I found my toothbrush, the scissors and the razor I use to trim my beard, and

some shampoo spread out in the same pattern I had left them back in the hotel bathroom. Abe Auerbauch ran a well-organized operation. We had been checked out of the hotel. The car we had been driving was no doubt returned to the rental company and the bills paid. I was willing to bet that the two tickets I couldn’t find in my briefcase had been used to fill our seats back to Bangkok. If anybody was looking for us, there would be no trace. We had disappeared. Whether or not we reappeared was going to depend on a man who apparently wanted the world to think he was still missing inside Vietnam or Laos. He was missing by choice. Now Christy and I were missing, too.

XII.

‘“‘T was the only fucker who did it. All those fucking pilots sitting in those fucking psieane, 8 those years, and I was the only one who got away.’ We were eating dinner. I had expected Chinese food, - or maybe a bit of Thai, nothing fancy. We were in a jungle camp, and anything special had to be carried in on muleback. We got smoked salmon with a chablis, a thick-cut, standing rib roast with a St. Emilion, and some kind of Australian champagne with the dessert. We ate at a table set up in the main room of Auerbauch’s headquarters building. I was wearing a gray-blue safari suit that had been in my suitcase, and Christy was in a dress, a light-cotton green affair she had worn once before. She was on the right of Auerbauch and Abi was sitting on his left. I sat directly across the table. Others at the table included Colonel Sao Tai, four 211

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other SIRA officers, and several young Shan ladies, all dressed in Burmese-style sarongs, but stylishly made up with the latest fashion of eye shadow and reeking of the kind of perfume I could never afford to buy for my ex-wife. The Asian ladies were spread among the men so that most of us had a girl on each side. The one on my right looked about seventeen years old. She was dressed in blue silk and had the round Shan face that was more cute than pretty. Every time our eyes met, she’d give me a smile that promised heaven, paradise, and a lot of good, healthy fun. I could claim I’m not much into child-women at my age, or maybe it was just the glances Christy kept tossing across the table at me, because I was wishing the girl would stop running her hand up and down my leg from the knee to the mid-thigh. At one point she whispered *‘Chu Lai’’ in my ear. I wasn’t sure whether she was giving me her name, describing one of the dishes on the table, or suggesting a Burmese sexual position. We were into the brandy, way into the brandy. Auerbauch was enjoying himself, bragging about how he had escaped from the Pathet Lao unit that had captured and held him for six months. I knew his boast was right—not a single American pilot captured in Laos or Vietnam ever managed to escape and make it back to friendly lines. Auerbauch was claiming he had done it, or almost had done it. I had learned the hard way early in the evening that it was easier to call him general than fight. ‘‘General,’’ I said, ‘‘I don’t understand. If you es-

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caped, why didn’t you go home? That was the whole purpose of escaping, wasn’t it?’’ *‘T got too sick,’’ Abe muttered. He stood up, waved _ his brandy glass at me, then in Sao Tai’s direction, and shouted, ‘‘Gambay!’’ He raised the glass, drained it, and placed it upside down on the table, then glared at us until we all did the same. While we waited for the young woman serving as a waitress to refill our glasses, Auerbauch continued with his story. “‘I was on the run for ten days in that damn jungle, eating crickets, lizards, snakes, anything I could catch. You wouldn’t believe what I was drinking for water. Christ, did I get sick.”’

Through dinner, he had been paying most of his attention to Christy, making sure she got the best cut of the beef, or ordering people around whenever her wineglass was less than half full. I couldn’t blame him for making the try, but I was pissed at the way Christy was playing straight lady to his storytelling. “*How did you survive?’’ she asked, picking up the cue he had thrown at her. ‘‘Damn lucky, I was damn lucky it wasn’t the Pathet - Lao that found me. It was old Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang boys who found me. Christ! I didn’t even know those bastards were still hanging around.”’ Auerbauch took the next hour telling the story. He had blundered into a group of Chinese Irregular Forces, remnants of Nationalist China’s lost fight for the mainland. They were on an opium-trading mission inside Laos, dealing with Lao government officials. Auerbauch was pretty far gone when they found him. As he de-

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scribed it, he was ‘‘shitting from one end faster than I could vomit from the other.”’ They took him back to one of their camps in the Golden Triangle. They weren’t sure what they had found, but they thought it might be worth some money, so they nursed him back to health. ‘‘T was fucking 100 percent insane,’’ he explained to s. ‘‘For six weeks I didn’t know piss from whiskey. I woke up one morning and it all came back.”’ ‘‘So,’’ Christy asked, still popping the right questions, ‘“why didn’t you go home then? Did the narcotics traffickers refuse to let you go?”’ ‘‘Hell no. I could have gone back anytime. Only I got mad and decided to wait awhile.” ‘“Mad?’’ I asked. ‘*Who the hell were you mad at?’’ ‘Once I got feeling a little human, they started bringing me a few things to keep me happy. One day they brought me a Time magazine. It was only two weeks old.”’ Abi was studying her father intently. He wasn’t what she had thought he would be when she was growing up, but the glow on her face made it obvious she approved of what she found. Daddy had come back from the grave and he was exactly the kind of hero a girl that grew up in a Golden Triangle village could understand. She had taken off the black cloth for the party and was wearing silk so fine it put the other Asian oi at the table in sackcloth. ‘*You know what was on the cover of that Time magazine?’’ Auerbauch asked, continuing with his story. “‘It was a picture of a bunch of prisoners of war getting

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off a plane in the Philippines. I did something they couldn’t do; I escaped. Only they got home before I could. They got home because our goddamn government gave up. The fuck-ass politicians in Washington surrendered so they could get the fucking prisoners back.’’ History, our confused politics, and a foreign policy designed by idiots had played Halloween, April Fools, and Truth or Consequences on Abe Auerbauch. “‘T said the hell with them all,’’ Auerbauch continued. He motioned in the direction of Sao Tai and the other men around the table. ‘“These fuckers never surrendered. They’ve been living in this fucking jungle since 1950. They still haven’t surrendered. These are the kinds of people I wanted to fight with. It was the best damn decision I could have made. Nobody back home gave the Vietnam veterans a parade, did they?’’ He looked around at all of us, raised his glass again,

checked to see the men were all drinking with him, and drained it. Then he added, giving Abi a look and a smile while he said it, ‘‘I get a parade every day.”’ I had to hand it to Auerbauch. He made Lord Jim look like a tourist from Toledo, Ohio, on a visit to Disneyland. From what I could strain out of the bragging, Auerbauch had done well as a jungle fighter. The group he had joined was part of the Fifth CIF, one of two of the Kuomintang armies still operating in the area. Auerbauch had proved himself in a couple of battles with some of the other warlords and one clash with the Burmese Army. He got on the good side of old General Tuan. By the time Tuan died, Auerbauch was

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ready to make his move, taking a small group of some of the best of Tuan’s men with him. He figured he was only getting started. ‘I’m going to be the new hero of the Shan people,’’ he bragged. ‘‘We’re going to kick the Burmese out and make our own country. I’m going to be the George Washington of the Shan States.’’ He sounded to me like he was planning more on being a new Caesar. I was willing to bet he wasn’t scheduling elections in the near future in the areas he already controlled. He talked a good line, but he was one more heroin trafficker, claiming he was going to right the wrongs of the Burmese government while he | piled up profits off narcotics. Christy looked almost as impressed as the daughter did, like she was about to trade Peter Pan for Robin Hood. ‘‘Being the leader of a revolution must be exciting,”’ she said. ““But don’t you miss home?’’ ‘‘Home? This is home.”’ ‘‘But your grandfather, if you went home, his fortune would be yours someday. Think what you could do with that money.”’ ‘‘What makes you think that old bastard would give it to me when he dies?’’ Auerbauch laughed and looked around the room. ‘‘T’ll take= not a promise from a man who always hated me.’ Christy looked at me, saw my contempt for her game, then made the point of pretending she didn’t understand my expression. She turned back to Abe. ‘‘How can you say that? He was ready to spend $3

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million trying to rescue you. Anyway, don’t you ever wonder what it’s like back home, what’s happened to the country since you left?’’ ‘“What makes you think I don’t know? What makes you think I haven’t been back?”’ I don’t think he meant to tell us. The booze had made him careless. He plunged ahead with his story. Christy listened with fascination, I with horror. If she had thought a minute about it, she could have realized that the more Auerbauch talked, the less the chance of him ever letting us go. “‘T was in San Francisco two months ago,’’ Abe bragged. ‘‘I’ve been back a dozen times in the last six years. That’s how I got the jump on all the rest of the bastards around here. I’ve got what they don’t have— contacts where it counts at the end of the line.”’ Abe’s glass was empty again. One of the girls waiting on the table moved forward and refilled it. He continued with his story. “‘That fucking grandfather of mine never bothered to find out what kind of family my mother came from. He thought they were nothing but poor chinks from Chinatown. They lived in Chinatown,

but they weren’t poor. I’ve got an uncle in San Francisco who doesn’t do all that shabby. Now we work together. I make him money; he makes me money. We cut out all the middlemen.’’ Auerbauch laughed, put his arm around his daughter on one side and the other arm around Christy, and pulled them both in for a hug. He wasn’t the only one giving hugs at the table. A couple of his men had already run past first base with the girls sitting beside

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them. Looking down at the left, I could see the sarong bundled up above the girl’s yellow-white knees, and the hand of the soldier on the other side disappearing under the silk. I was happy to see Christy frown as she fought her way to sit back up, trying to shake Auerbauch’s paw off in the process. He gave up the attempt at getting friendly and went back to telling his story. ‘My fucking grandfather never understood about family. The Chinese do.’’ Auerbauch waved his hand around the room, taking in Sao Tai, the other men, the girls, and everything as far as the imagination could go. “‘My uncle has made all this possible. He’s taking over the whole West Coast back home. I’m taking over out here. Give us another year and we’ll both be invincible.”’ The entertainment came in. Five musicians carrying traditional instruments—cymbals, a two-stringed violin, a small drum, and a couple of other things—sat down on the floor in one corner, tuned up, then started to play. Five young Shan women, dressed in long silk wraparound skirts, ran in following each other. Each had a lighted candle in each hand. The people on my side of the table had to turn their chairs around to watch. Someone turned off the lights and the dancers started the candle dance, a slow, stately performance with their hands weaving moving patterns of light that bounced off their pretty round faces and the silk cloth of their costumes. I thought about Auerbauch’s story as I watched the girls dance. It was easy to figure out, not just why he had stayed there, but what he was trying to do.

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No wonder the SIRA had such good weapons, we could eat smoked salmon in the jungle, and Auerbauch could afford to pay for the kind of soldiers he had. If Auerbauch had cut out some of the middlemen and was dealing directly with one of the Chinese Triads on the West Coast, he was making the kind of money that would scare even his grandfather. Like anybody who’s lived in Thailand for a while, I knew a bit about the economics of the heroin trade. The farmers who grow opium make damn near nothing off the black gum—maybe only $400 or $500 a year at the most. The warlords who buy the opium in Burma, turn

it into heroin in jungle laboratories, and smuggle it into Thailand where the international buyers can pick it up, don’t make that much either. Heroin sells along the Thai/Burmese border for between $3,000 and $5,000 a kilo. Half or more of that is

eaten up in production costs. It takes ten kilos of opium and another ten or fifteen kilos of various other chemi_ cals to make a kilo of hercin. The pure heroin that sells for $4,000 in Chiang Mai is worth $250,000 wholesale in the United States. Cut it down to 5 percent purity and sell it as nickel bags in the ghettos, it will bring over a million dollars. That’s a lot of profit, but all the real money is being made after the white powder leaves the Golden Triangle. If Abe Auerbauch had worked out a deal where he could cut into some of the big profits by dealing directly with San Francisco, he was stacking the money faster than a barnyard stacks shit. I could hear Auerbauch behind me, playing teacher to

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Christy. He was explaining the dance and the people he wanted to make his subjects. “‘The Shans who live in this part of Burma want nothing to do with the Burmese in Rangoon,”’ he told Christy and his daughter. “‘The Shans are cousins of the Thai. It’s the same language group and they have a lot of the same customs. They’ve _been fighting to be free from the Burmese ever since Great Britain walked out and left the people in Rangoon in charge. The Shan problem has been leadership. I’m going to give them that.”’ Shan nationalism, hell, I thought, resisting the temptation to turn around and stare at him, or call him on his lies. Abe Auerbauch

wasn’t any better than Khun

Sa,

General Li, or any of the rest of them. He was one more heroin trafficker hiding under the Shan banner. Only he was doing them one up. With his uncle’s connections in San Francisco, Auerbauch was on his way to cornering the trade in Southeast Asian heroin. With a little help from his San Francisco family, he was grabbing a monopoly on a billion-dollar business. I wondered how sick Auerbauch had really been when he was found by the Chinese nationalists after he escaped from the Lao prison. My bet was he hadn’t been as crazy as he told us. He must have already known what kind of business his uncle had back home before he bailed out of that plane. The attaché in Bangkok had called him a crook, even while he still wore the uniform. He recognized immediately the opportunities when he found his rescuers were heroin supply merchants. It was a perfect setup. The personal contact is every-

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thing in the Chinese Triad. If they don’t know you, they don’t do business with you. Auerbauch wouldn’t be carrying heroin back personally. He would hire human mules to do that. But his trips to the States he bragged about would be critical to his personal relations on the American side. If he couldn’t make those trips every few months, he was back to being one more warlord with a ragtag, hungry army. The girls finished the candle dance and the lights came back on. They ran out the door, and three minutes later came running back in, this time with long brass ornaments on the tips of their fingers. I heard Auerbauch start to explain the fingernail dance to Christy. I went back to ignoring the small hand inching back up my thigh and concentrating on working through the problem. As long as Auerbauch

was listed missing in action,

his trips to the States would be no problem. False passports are easy to get. If he wanted, he could proba_bly even get one legally in his own name. The State Department passport office would never check a routine application against the MIA lists. But let anyone in enforcement find out he was alive and dealing heroin, and it was all over. Army records would be pulled, pictures distributed, lookouts posted, and DEA offices alerted. Auerbauch wouldn’t only have to give up the trips back to the States, he wouldn’t be able to sneak into Thailand for a weekend in Chiang Mai. Of course, he didn’t have to worry about anybody finding out about it. Who would tell? He sure wasn’t

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going to let us spread the word. Right now he was keeping us as pets, toys to amuse him and his daughter, but when he tired of the game, we wouldn’t be going back to tell J. J. what happened to his grandson. I knew what game he was playing with Christy. That’s what was keeping me alive for a while, too. He wanted Christy to take off her own panties. That was more fun than rape. But she would have to like him to do it. She wouldn’t like him if he hung me outside the camp entrance beside Wilai. It was past midnight when the party finally broke up, but I damn sure wasn’t ready for bed. I had to talk to Christy. We were in trouble, and the way she was playing up to Abe Auerbauch worried me that she hadn’t figured out how much trouble. ; There wasn’t an announcement that the evening had come to an end. Abe just suddenly stood up. When Christy followed his example, he took hold of her arm and directed her toward the door. By the time I got up, shook off the hands of the little Shan girl who had been sitting beside me, and made it to the door, Christy and Auerbauch were already out in the middle of the parade ground, walking in the moonlight toward Christy’s hut. I started in their direction, but two of Abe’s men jumped in the way. One of them grunted something I didn’t understand, but I did know what he was trying to say with the finger pointing in the direction of my own hut on the opposite side of the parade ground from Christy’s. My two sudden friends accompanied me back to my quarters. It was all polite with smiles tossed in,

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but I was getting no choice in whom I picked for late-night company. I told them both a loud good-night at the door to my hut and went in, figuring I would give it an hour and then try to sneak across to Christy’s place for a chat. I kept my clothes on but slipped under the mosquito net draped around the bed and laid down to wait. Twenty minutes later I found out just how far Abe Auerbauch was willing to go to ensure the comfort of a first-class prisoner. The door to my hut couldn’t be locked from the inside, so she didn’t have to knock. There was just enough moonlight coming through the cheap cloth curtain over the one window that I could see her as she stepped into the room. She took a couple of steps forward into the square of light from the window and stood there for a minute. When she first came in I thought she was Christy, but Christy stands a lot taller than five feet, and she wouldn’t -be wearing a wrap-around sarong. That was all the girl in my room was wearing. Naked shoulders glared white in the moonlight. The sarong had been hiked up and knotted just above her breasts, which hid that part but showed a pretty set of legs down below. Long black hair hung down, framing her face. She didn’t wait for an invitation. She stepped out of the moonlight and reached forward, searching with a hand for the break in the mosquito net. Finding that, she started to climb through onto the bed. Going in, she met me coming out. I pushed her back up to her feet, my hands discover-

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ing beads of cool water on her shoulders, evidence of a bath just taken. We were back in the moonlight and I could see enough of her face to recognize the girl who had been sitting beside me. ‘*Chu Lai?’’ I whispered, hoping that was her name and not a suggestion for what she was there for. We were standing close. Her hands were exploring my sides, her face turned up for an expected kiss. ‘‘Maakan,’’ she whispered, ‘‘why you still wear clothes?”’ I wondered how I had managed to get all the way through dinner without learning she spoke that much English. ‘‘Chu Lai help you take off.’’ Her hands had broken | through my defenses and were starting to unbutton my shirt. I tried to push her away. In the dark, I ended up with a sudden handful of firm, rounded tit. I dropped it like a hot frying pan. ‘‘What matter you? You no like Chu Lai?’’ I never met a young girl I didn’t like. If we had been anyplace else, I would have already been giving myself the arguments about why difference in age wasn’t that important, especially when the subject of discussion was a night of fun, not forever after. But she wasn’t there because she liked making it with men twice her size. She was Auerbauch’s idea of a tranquilizer for doomed prisoners, or perhaps a booby prize to occupy me while he tried for first prize in the hut across the parade ground. The son of a bitch was probably already suggesting to Christy that she didn’t have to worry about me. Chu Lai had stopped trying to take my clothes off,

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but she was still standing close enough that I could feel a shiver running through her. It wasn’t the cold; she was scared. She had been given specific orders, but things weren’t working out. Chin or one of his men would be outside waiting for her when it was done. They would want details, and if she didn’t have them, she’d be in trouble. I led her over to the bed and sat her down. Her English wasn’t all that good and having to whisper made it even harder to get the idea across. Shan is close enough to Thai that when her English ran out we could still communicate, but it took time. That was okay. The longer she spent inside the hut, the more likely they would believe I had used her instead of just talked to her. When I thought she had it straight, I got up and walked over to where my pants were lying. I dug out the money clip that had been returned and pulled off a couple of the purple 500-baht notes. I took them over and gave them to the girl. ‘“*‘Look,’’ I said, repeating the explanation, ‘‘if anybody ask, we have good time. I very big.’’ I held out my palms, imitating the old crones outside the cage in the first village. While I explained it again, she was very carefully hiding the money in the folds of her sarong. A few minutes later she slipped out. As I watched Chu Lai walk across the parade ground under a starry sky, ] regretted for a moment not having taken advantage of the offer. But if Christy and I had any chance of getting out of here, we were going to have to trust each other. It would be just like Abe to tell

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about the girl as part of his campaign to get into Christy’s panties. I wanted to look Christy square in the eye when I told her that I had not taken advantage of the Shan girl. . I went back to the bed, figuring I would give it another thirty minutes before trying to cross the yard to Christy’s place. The shutters on the glassless window were open and only a curtain was between me and the outside, so I slipped out that way, figuring any guards would be standing at the front door. My mistake. I hit the ground to find one of my escorts from the dinner hall, a chubby fellow with a set of bulging eyes, standing there, his rifle pointing right at my balls. He marched me around to the door of the hut and waited while I went in. Ap Aue Pak paid enough to make sure his guards stayed awake all night. I know; I checked every hour or so to make sure. A new guard was standing there in the morning, but didn’t offer any objections when hunger finally drove me to trying a run to where dinner had been served the night before. I walked across the parade ground and up the steps of the main building. Inside, I found Christy and Auerbauch sitting opposite each other with cups of coffee in front of them. Christy looked happy to see me. Chin looked at me like he had forgotten I was around. Christy and I gave each other a friendly good morning and Abe invited me to sit down with a grunt. I had just gotten the first cup of coffee and was blowing

[ss

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across the top to cool it down a bit when one of the jungle soldiers came running in to see Auerbauch. He said something in whatever dialect of Chinese they were speaking, and Abe gave an order in reply. Abe stood up as soon as the man left. He looked indecisive for a second, like he didn’t want to leave the two of us alone. Whatever the news he had just heard,

it must have been important, because he decided he had no choice. ‘‘Forgive me.’’ He was talking to Christy, not me. ‘There are some things I must take care of. Enjoy your breakfast. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”’ As soon as he was out the door, I turned to Christy. I didn’t know how much time alone. we would have. Before I could start, she did.

‘‘My God, Morgan, how are we going to get out of here? He’s going to kill us, isn’t he? He can’t let us go after what we heard last night.”’ I love bright women. It cuts down the chatter when time’s important. She had understood the blueprint, but put on an act with Abe to keep him thinking she was a dumb blonde. ‘I don’t believe that man,’’ she continued. “‘He knows that’s what he will do, but he spent half the night _in my room trying to seduce me. It was polite and nice, like boys used to treat girls back in the fifties. He thinks I’m so dumb that I can’t figure out that once I let him screw me, it won’t be long before he gets tired of me, and you and I are both dead.”’ ‘Don’t be so certain you’ll get killed when it’s over. He could decide to keep you around.”’ ”’

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It was possible. Keeping a blond mistress in his jungle camp might appeal to Auerbauch. It would make him the envy of every other warlord in the Golden Triangle, another bit of show that he had climbed higher up than the rest of them. Christy was thinking the same thing. “‘There is no way,’” she blurted out, ‘“‘that I will do anything that makes that bastard like me enough to keep me around as a concubine.”’ ‘*Fine,’’ I said and smiled at her. ‘‘But don’t make

him mad yet. The longer it takes, the better our chances of finding a way to get out of this.”’ ‘‘Don’t worry, Morgan. I'll do what I can to play him along. But sooner or later he’ll get tired of waiting for me to give it to him. Then he’ll take it, but he’s going to have to fight to get it.”’ Before I could say anything else, one of the camp girls doing servant duty came in carrying a plateful of eggs, bacon, and a stack of hotcakes. Rather than setting them on the table in front of us, she served Christy first, then walked around the long table and served me. I was still stacking the hotcakes on my plate when Abi came in. ‘**Good morning,”’ she said in her schoolgirl English, all bright and sunshiny. The three of us ate breakfast with Abi asking questions about America and the rest of the world she had never seen. As she jabbered on with Christy, I wondered how much she had figured out. Sometimes she seemed as tough as her father, or the old man back in

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Seattle. Other times, it was like there was a soft, lovable creature trying to escape out of an iron cage. When we finished breakfast, she invited Christy back to the room she had in the same building where we had been eating. Christy tried to beg off, obviously anxious to continue our conversation in private. The way Abi insisted suggested that Auerbauch had sent his daughter in with specific instructions to make sure that Christy and I didn’t get any time alone. After the two of them disappeared into the back of the building, I got up and walked outside. The sun was hot, with no breeze. It was the kind of day that people in that part of the world take easy, finding a shady spot and never hurrying, except, apparently, in the camp of Ap Aue Pak. Every man in a jungle uniform seemed on the move, running between buildings, training in platoon-size groups, carrying supplies and ammunition, or inspect-ing the perimeter defenses. Nobody paid any attention to me, as long as I didn’t get close to the hut in the center of the camp with a roof that bristled antennas, or anywhere near the defense network. Other than that, I was pretty much free to walk around looking the place over. The camp held about three hundred fighting men. Ap Aue Pak would have to have at least two thousand men under arms to compete with the other warlords, so this was only one camp of several he would have scattered throughout the area he controlled. As far as I could tell, it was strictly a military camp. I saw no evidence of chemical stores, waste dumps, or

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other indications of lab activity. Any refineries he operated would be hidden in the jungle along with opium supplies and chemicals. The camp we were in was a base and command camp, the place from which Auerbauch ran his operation. While most of the jungle soldiers looked experienced, there was one platoon of new troops who spent the day training in the hot sun on the parade ground. Their instructor was a mean little bastard who stood only five feet tall, but looked as competent as he was small. Two grenades hung from the front of his jungle uniform and he had a canteen on each hip. A .357 Magnum revolver sat in a holster under his arm, and the

short sleeves of his fatigue shirt exposed tattoos of panthers and snakes that wiggled and twisted with each ripple of the tight muscles of his biceps. There were fifteen dormitory huts sleeping twenty men each. I peeked inside one of them and saw rows of wooden-plank beds with straw mats on top, not what it takes to make a U.S. soldier happy at night, but all that an Asian farm boy would expect. Besides the dormitory huts, there were several smaller huts like the ones Christy and I were sleeping in. I saw Sao Tai going into one of them a couple of times, and some of the other officers who had been at dinner would walk into one of the others once in a while. Apparently, each of the officers got his own quarters. Other huts near the headquarters building housed the cooks, the servants, and the collection of young girls who had sat with us and provided the entertainment at dinner. A few of the girls were outside when I walked

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by, washing clothes, brushing hair, or talking with each other. Chu Lai came out of one of the huts, looked at me, smiled, then turned and fled back inside when one of the other girls said something that sounded crude, even if I didn’t understand the language. I spent a lot of time looking from a distance at the defense perimeter. The camp was surrounded by a circle of slit trenches dug in a zigzag pattern. Coils of barbed wire stretched in front of the trenches and the jungle had been cleared for another twenty yards in front of the wire. Four machine-gun emplacements at the compass points ensured a full field of crossfire against anyone trying to cross the cleared area, which also had to be mined. The only breaks in the defense perimeter were two entrances, one on the south side where we had been brought in the day before, and the other on the north side. The camp stood across a trail that had probably been used long before Abe Auerbauch had started call- ing himself Ap Aue Pak. The couple of times I saw Abe Auerbauch, he was on the move, with never less than three of his officers trailing behind. Something was up. All leaves were canceled and the stench of trouble hung in the air like the smell of a thunderstorm moving in. The longer the afternoon dragged on, the hotter and muggier it got. I finally decided I had learned all there was to know about the camp. I let the soldiers play mad dogs and Englishmen and I went back to my hut, stretched out on the bed, and took a nap.

XHil.

Somebody pounded on the door about 6:30 that evening | with a rifle butt. I opened it, not knowing what to |

expect, and discovered it was Bug Eyes telling me | dinner was served. I walked across the compound and into the headquarters building. Abe and most of the men of the night before were already there along with the Shan beauties. Auerbauch motioned me into the same chair, where | sat between

the same girls. Someone poured me a brandy and we had the first toast of the evening. Just as we were finishing the drink, Christy and Abi joined us, each sitting beside the host. Abi had found Christy a dark-blue-silk Thai sarong and a light-blue matching blouse with little gold buttons down the front. It was the first time I had ever seen a round-eyed woman do a Thai dress justice. Abe and a couple of 232

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his men applauded when she walked in. I joined them. Looking around, the only person missing was Sao Tai. Abe didn’t offer any explanations about where he had gone. This time Chu Lai and I said a couple of words to each other. That put a smile on Abe’s face and he looked in Christy’s direction to see if she had noted what good friends I had become with the little Shan lady. Except for that one smirk of Abe’s, there weren’t many smiles at the table that evening. The tension I had felt in the afternoon still hung in the air. The brandy glasses only got filled a couple of times, and there was no entertainment. Several times Abe was interrupted by one of his men coming through the door and up to the table to whisper a message in his ear. A couple of times after listening, he would motion to one of the officers

sitting at the table, who would get up and follow the ’ messenger back outside. Dinner broke up early. Whatever was worrying Abe, it didn’t interfere with his attempt at establishing a new love life. Again, I watched Abe and Christy walk across the parade ground toward her hut while I was marched

to mine.

;

Chu Lai came through the door of my hut ten minutes after I was put in for the night. I had taken off my shirt but still had my pants on, expecting that she or one of the other girls would be around again. I was glad it was Chu Lai. That avoided having to go through an explanation a second time.

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This time she was wearing the same clothes she had wom at dinner, but she carried a paper sack in one hand. I had been around Thai women long enough to know that the sack would have her sarong and probably a comb and a toothbrush inside. Someone had decided she should spend the night. She stood there just inside the door, a smile trying to fight through the fear on her face. ‘‘Please, Maakan, no make. Chu Lai go. General get very mad. Say Chu Lai bad girl, not make Maakan happy.”’ There wasn’t much I could do. I didn’t want her © getting a beating because of my newly acquired moral qualms. Besides, maybe I had been missing an opportunity. Chu Lai might have some information about the camp that I could use for planning an escape. I motioned her into the room. **No worry,’” she whispered. “‘Chu Lai be good girl, sleep on floor.”’ I wasn’t going to make her do that, but I wasn’t going to volunteer to sleep there, either. It wasn’t the hard floor I wanted us to avoid; it was the mosquitos that would be filling the room as soon as the lights went off. The bed was big enough for us both to sleep on without touching. Also, the questions I wanted to ask would have to be whispered. Whisper, then sleep, that’s all I had planned, honest. First, she did what everyone does in that part of the world before going to bed. She went into the bathroom and took a bath, dipping water out of the large clay jar standing on the floor. I sat on the bed listening to the

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water splash as she tossed it over her back-a dipper at a time. She came out wearing the same sarong she had been wearing the night before. The sarong was damp enough from her wet skin to make it obvious that was all she had on. Looking at her standing in the harsh light of the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, she looked older than I had first thought, more like her early twenties. Her skin, closer to white than brown, was the color thought to be the most beautiful in Thailand and Burma. The top of her head just reached my chest. The tips of her nipples were making little lumps through the cloth of the sarong, which molded around two surprisingly good-size breasts. She wasn’t a child; she was a woman wrapped in a small package. I reminded myself again that I wasn’t going to play Abe’s game, even if it might be the last meal he was offering. I motioned her to climb through the mosquito * net. I turned off the light, then followed.

Once we were lying chastely side by side, I started asking her a bit about herself, switching back and forth from English to Thai as we searched for a common means of understanding. She was from a small town outside of Taungyi. She had grown up in an area under Burmese government control and gone to a Burmese school, which is where she had learned her English. She had been captured in a raid by a small-time warlord and sold to an opium caravan trading with the SIRA. Her next stop was this

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camp. She had been a virgin when she arrived and Ap Aue Pak had personally done the honors. After that, like all the other girls in the camp, she had been passed down the line of officers, moving to a lesser rank each time a man got tired of her. She had been sleeping with a lieutenant for a couple of weeks ~ when I arrived. When I asked her what happened when a girl ran out of officers who wanted her, she told me that Ap Aue Pak would throw a party every couple of months or so for the non-coms and enlisted men and pass around the girls who had reached the bottom rung. The way she shuddered when she described the scene, it must have been one hell of a party from the men’s point of view. She didn’t know what happened after that. The girls, once nobody wanted them anymore, were taken away by one of the caravans that brought in new flesh from time to time. Most of the girls hoped they would end up in a whorehouse in Mai Sai or some other Thai town. That didn’t sound like much of a future, but the truth was probably worse. I couldn’t imagine any warlord, let alone one with a secret like Ap Aue Pak’s, turning loose someone who had spent several months in one of his camps. Chu Lai and I were suffering from the same fatal disease—we knew too much. I suppose that’s as good an excuse as any for what happened next. We were two people with no future. Besides, it was almost like we had already done it, lying on the bed, talking quietly to each other. So you can’t blame us for getting seconds, even if it was firsts. She made the first move, touching my hand with

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hers, then stroking my arm. She moved in closer and we had our arms around each other, cuddling more than hugging. I moved my hand down to her hip, feeling the rounded softness of her bottom. She moved in even closer, changing the tempo from cuddling to something more. That was all the encouragement I needed to move my hand a bit lower, finding the bottom hem of her sarong. I brought my hand back up, this time touching naked thigh. If she had done anything to discourage me, I would have stopped. Instead, I felt her two hands between us, trying to unbutton my pants. I took my hand out from under the sarong and did the work of taking off my own clothes for her. When I rolled back after having slipped my pants off, I found two round breasts waiting for me. I bent forward and circled one tiny nipple with my lips. She gasped, either because her nipple tingled, or she was making a comment on what her hand had just _ found down below. I kept rolling the nipple with my lips while her other hand joined in the exploration. ‘*Maakan very big. Maybe no can fit Chu Lai.’’ I told her that was okay, that we didn’t have to put it in, that I didn’t want to hurt her.

She went a little bit crazy, moaning and smothering me with kisses. It had to be the first time she had ever been told she could say no, the first time she could make love because that’s what she wanted to do. I helped her roll over on top of me so she could keep control and we worked at getting me into the smallest pussy I had ever met.

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It wasn’t hard at all. We were both soaking wet, and she had lots of experience at the mechanics. At first, she was all efficiency, doing for me what she had learned to do so well with Abe’s officers. Somewhere along the way, she stopped being efficient and shifted to enthusiasm. With her sitting up on top of me, her face in the moonlight, I could watch the surprise, then the contortions of her features as she started to come. ‘*Maakan, I love you,’’ she groaned as her muscles tightened around my cock, bringing me off right behind her. Finished, she fell forward, collapsing on my chest. We lay there, still joined while I grew soft inside. She raised, looked at me, and smiled in the faint light. ‘“What Maakan do Chu Lai? That never happen Chu Lats” Goddamn Abe Auerbauch and his pig-fucking traffickers. Chu Lai was a piece of sculptured art, a musical instrument for a man to tune and produce joy. They had been using her for a toilet. Shouting and screaming woke me up. It was coming across the parade ground and the voice doing the screaming was Christy’s. I rolled out of bed and grabbed my pants, hopping into them while I moved for the door. Abe must have gotten tired of gentle seductions and decided it was time to deal with Christy like he did with Chu Lai and the other camp whores. I had no idea what I was going to do once I was out the door. | was a dead man anyway, so I might as well

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get shot trying to prevent a rape as end up on a thom ‘tree like Wilai. They had locked the door from the outside. I spun and headed for the window, wondering why they had bothered to lock the door when the window was open. It was a simple answer: it’s a hell of a lot easier taking a man diving out a window than one charging through a door. I was hit twice with rifle butts before I bounced on the ground. Instead of doing the tumbler’s roll I had planned, I landed flat on my back and right between

jungle boots kicking into my ribs from each side. When they were sure I wasn’t going to get up on my own, they dragged me around to the front and unlocked the door. Along the way, I was conscious enough to note that the shouting and screaming from the other side of the parade ground had stopped. I wondered why. I didn’t think that Abe would want to knock her unconscious and spoil the fun. Chu Lai was waiting inside the hut when they tossed - me through the door. She helped me back to the bed, and brought a wet towel from the bathroom to clean the blood, dirt, and horse pucky off me. My head, ribs, and kidneys hurt like a smashed finger, but nothing was broken.

_

A loud slam and total darkness announced that the

_ guards had closed the shutters on the window. I lay there through the night trying to catch any sounds from Christy’s hut while Chu Lai gently massaged my aches and pains. Chu Lai’s tender loving didn’t do much for my frustration and anger, but it did help the aches a bit. By

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early morning I could even say yes when Chu Lai shyly asked if we could try it again. It took us half as long to prove her first orgasm of the night wasn’t a one-time accident. When I woke up an hour later, she was dressed and ready to go. I climbed out through the mosquito net and stood with her by the door. Someone had opened the shutters on the window. Chu Lai looked up at me, then reached for a kiss. When we parted I saw she was crying. I kissed her tears and she turned and was gone through the door, walking toward the huts where she and the other camp women spent their days, but never their nights. Three-quarters of the way across, she stopped, turned around, and our eyes met again. I didn’t feel a single bit of guilt about what we had given each other during the night. A guard had been standing in front of the hut, watching our good-bye. I wondered what was supposed to happen next. I went back inside and dressed. In the morning light, it was hard to believe the night was real, but I had to find out what had happened to Christy. I walked back out of the hut and took a tentative step away from the door. When the guard did nothing, I walked across the porch, down the steps, and started across the parade ground, expecting all the way to feel the shock of a bullet in my backside. I made it to the steps to the porch of the headquarters building without anybody trying to stop me. Inside, I found Christy sitting at the table by herself eating steak

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and eggs. She was dressed in her jeans and looking fit and well. ‘“‘My God, Morgan,”’ she cried, jumping to her feet and running toward me. ‘‘What happened to your face?’’ Surprised to find her so obviously okay, I gave her a hug and led her back to the table, where we both sat

down across from each other. I waited while one of the servants poured some coffee, took a sip, and then told her about my dive through the window trying to stop what I thought was a rape in progress. ‘*Poor baby,’’ she said, leaning across the table to touch my face. “‘I guess that’s what it was, only Abi came in and stopped it.”’ “*Abi?”’ *““Abe got tired of trying the polite way and started telling me I had no choice. I hollered that he had better damn well call some of his thugs to come and hold me down while he did it. He shouted that was just what he ‘was going to do and that they would get the seconds. He was on his way out the door when he ran into Abi coming inside.’’ I had to admire the way she was telling it, so calm and cool. But it wasn’t easy. She was close to tears. She stopped, took a couple of breaths, and fought to - keep control. When she had it, she continued. ‘I’ve never seen a man change so fast. Abi asked what the noise was, and said it had woken her up. Abe told her that he was sorry, and that she should go back to bed. He walked out of the hut with her and back toward his place. That was the last I saw of him.”’

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‘*That’s all it took, just the girl walking in?’’ I asked in disbelief. ‘“Whatever kind of bastard he is,’’ Christy suggested, ‘the loves his daughter. He’s like most other fathers; he wants her to think he’s the greatest.”’ I’m not one of those people who believe in total evil, so I was willing to concede that Abe loved his daughter. But if Abe was giving up. on Christy, that put us that much closer to the permanent solution to the problem we presented to him. Christy thought otherwise. “‘Look, Morgan, we can use Abi. I’ve been mothering her since yesterday morning. She’s a lonely child and she likes me. She’s pretty savvy, too. She knew exactly what all the noise was about last night. She came in deliberately to stop it.”’ Abe Auerbauch might be crazy about his daughter, but he wouldn’t be suicidal crazy. He wanted a daughter and a heroin empire, too. He couldn’t be sure of both as long as Christy and I were around. Still, we didn’t have anything else we could do, so I told Christy to sound Abi out. She never got a chance to try. We had half finished breakfast when both Abe and Abi came marching out of the back part of the building where they had their living quarters. Abe was dressed in new jungle fatigues and Abi was wearing a set that matched his down to the pearl-handled revolver stuck in a holster on her utility belt. She looked proud and ready for war. ‘“We have an attack by the Burmese Army on our hands,’’ Abe announced. ‘‘Ne Win’s clowns do this about once a year. They come up here in force, thrash

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around in the jungle for a week, get a few porters killed by our land mines, then spend the next six months bragging to the U.S. embassy about the great job they are doing fighting drug traffickers.’’ *‘Are they going to attack here?’’ Christy asked. “They have never come this far yet,’’ Abe snorted. ‘“*That’s why I’m going to one of my forward bases, so I can direct the fighting. You two will be safe here. We'll be back in a few days.”’ They were almost to the door before Christy could shout, “‘You’re not taking that child into a combat zone?’’ The only reason Abe bothered giving a reply was that he was still trying hard to impress his daughter. Christy and I had been written off. He turned back to Christy. ‘‘Miss Hammond, my daughter has chosen to be a soldier. Where and how she fights is no concern of yours.”’ Abe’s act was working as far as Abi was concerned. She was standing by her father, beaming, one hand ' resting on the butt of the pistol she was wearing. “‘Don’t worry, Christy. My father will win again and we’ll be back.”’ I followed them out the door. A mounted squad of - Abe’s men had ridden up and were waiting in front of ‘the porch. Besides the men on horseback, there were several pack animals loaded down

with ammo

boxes,

extra arms, and communication equipment. The band was back in place and broke into “‘Hail to the Chief’’ as Abe and the girl marched to the two horses being held for them and mounted up.

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From his saddle, Abe called to the little sergeant that had been training troops the day before. The man jumped forward for some last instructions. While Abe was giving them, he looked right at me, and then the sergeant did, too. I didn’t understand the language they had been speaking, but I knew what orders had been given. Abe finished with the tattooed sergeant, sat up in his saddle, and barked a command. The squad wheeled their mounts in unison and started a trot past the band, heading toward the south portal of the camp. As they rode past the thorn tree, I saw Abi raise up in the stirrups and spit in the direction of the body still hanging there. I found Christy standing back inside the door. She was mad, but for the wrong reason. She still hadn’t figured it out. She was worried about Abi. ‘‘What kind of monster is that man, taking a child off to fight?’’ she asked. ‘Worse than you imagine,’’ I answered, “‘but not for

the reasons you think.”’ The look on my face probably told part of the story, because she stopped looking mad and started looking scared before asking me what I meant. ‘*Abe and his daughter marched out the south side of the camp. They didn’t take just men, they took radios and equipment, just about everything that’s not nailed down. The Burmese Army will come in from the north. He’s letting his daughter play soldier, but he’s taking her, everything his men can carry, and his own skin someplace safer. He’s probably going to slip across the border into Thailand and wait for the Burmese Army to

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go home whiie the men he left behind do all the fighting.’’ Christy was standing by the table and she sat down in one of the dining chairs. ‘‘My God,’’ she said, understanding what it meant. ‘‘He’s left us here to be killed or captured by the Burmese Army.”’ *“Being captured by the Burmese Army is the only chance we have,’’ I said. ‘‘We’re on their side, not Abe’s.”’ **Then maybe there’s a chance for us.”’ *‘T hope so. It won’t be a Burmese weapon that kills us, but you can be damn sure that’s what he will tell Abi. It’s a perfect solution to the problem we present. He and Abi will ride back to find we were both killed by Burmese troops. Abi will still think her father is a great man while she gives us a nice funeral.”’ We were alone in the room except for a couple of serving girls who were clearing the morning dishes from the table. I looked around, hoping to find something we could use for a weapon. I tried to get into the back of the building, thinking Abe might have left a pistol or a rifle in his room. The doors to that part of the structure were locked. I walked out onto the front porch,

wondering if I could sneak into the kitchen and steal a knife or something. There were lots of real weapons in the hands of the men left in the camp, but I would have to kill one of them to get my fingers on something we could defend ourselves with. That would be our only chance. Outside, the camp was getting ready for war and ready to run at the same time. One group of jungle

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soldiers was carrying ammo boxes out to the trenches. A second group was carrying things like cooking utensils, food supplies, and the musical instruments into the jungle through the south exit. Several of them were also carrying shovels. They would bury the supplies someplace in the jungle to be recovered once the Burmese Army left the area. If the Burmese Army did attack the camp, the SIRA were going to fight and run, not stand to the bitter end. While the men did the work, the officers were shouting orders and arguing with each other at a command post that had been set up by the radio shack. Three times I saw scouts slip in through the north gate and hurry to the group of officers at the command post. They would be bringing the latest info on the Burmese Army positions. A few of the girls were milling outside of their day huts, puzzled by the sudden activity, but still flirting with whatever officer happened to be passing by. Chu Lai stepped out of the front door of one hut and looked over in my direction. I was going to wave, but decided against it, not wanting to have to answer questions from Christy. I’ve always regretted not giving that wave. The mean little sergeant with the tattoos appeared from somewhere and herded all the girls into two of the huts, shouting threats as he did so, waving the SAR-80 he was holding to speed them along. Chu Lai was the last girl into the hut nearest to us. That chore done, the miniature Shan Rambo

tured

and walked in our direction. My gut twisted with hope-

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less anger and fear. This must be it. He hadn’t wanted the camp whores to watch while he slaughtered the two of us. Christy reached over and grabbed my hand. I could feel it cold and trembling in my own. He was standing in front of us, looking up at us on the porch, holding _ the rifle across his chest. He was looking at Christy, not like a man looks at someone he is going to kill, but someone he wants. He stared for a few seconds longer, then finally said, *“Burmese come. No safe here. Follow me.”’ He turned and walked toward the middle of the camp, checking twice to make sure we were following him. He stopped at a small guard post about twenty yards from one of the huts in which he had locked the girls. The guard position was nothing more than a box made out of bamboo about four feet square with a thatched _ roof. It covered a foxhole the same size around and about three feet deep. Green sandbags surrounded the box on all sides to a height of two and a half feet off the ground. “*Get in here,’’ he said and motioned with the rifle. ‘*Be safe when Burmese attack.”’ We both crowded into the small space and sat down together. He turned and walked away. ‘‘Morgan, maybe they aren’t going to kill us. Why would they put us here if they didn’t want to keep us safe?”’ I didn’t want to argue with her, so I put my arm around her and pulled her in. The waiting would be

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easier if she thought the Burmese Army was all we had to fear. We would be safer where we were if someone started lobbing mortar shells, but we would also be right where Tattoo could find us when he decided it was time to execute the orders I was positive he had gotten from Abe Auerbauch. He was probably supposed to have already done it. had seen the way he looked at Christy on the porch. He was hoping the Burmese wouldn’t show up for the party. If they didn’t, he had his own ideas for some entertainment before he carried out Abe’s orders. It was getting embarrassing how my life kept stretching out in short pieces because somebody wanted to fuck Christy Hammond.

XIV.

Two minutes after Tattoo had left us in the guard emplacement, I stood up and looked over the rim of the sandbags. The preparations were continuing with lots of movement back and forth. Every so often, one of the “men would run by close to our position. I was ready to sell both nuts to get my hands on one of their SAR-80s. I wanted to go down with a weapon in my hand, not shot like a hog in a pigpen. I spent two hours standing there, hoping one of them would get careless, maybe stop close by and stand looking away, anything that would give me a chance to tackle him from behind. I thought about trying to sneak out of the guard emplacement, crossing the open ground to one of the other huts, hoping to find a weapon left lying around someplace. It wouldn’t work. The way the men looked at me as they hurried by on one errand or another said it 249

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all. The word had been passed. Tattoo wanted to save Christy for a while, not me. All I needed was to give any one of them an excuse and Christy would be waiting for the next act alone.

The fighting started an hour later. There was an explosion off the north side of the camp, then scream-

ing for half a minute. ‘‘What’s that?’’ Christy asked, standing beside me. ‘‘Probably somebody stepped on a mine. The Burmese Army recruits porters from among the local population to carry their supplies. They put them out in front as human mine detectors.”’ It was another five minutes before we heard anything else. A couple of SAR-80s and one of the machine guns opened up. After a few rounds, that stopped and it was quiet for a while. Next we heard another mine go off,

this one on the western side of the camp. After ten or twelve minutes of silence, I heard a whump off to the north. “‘Down!’’ I shouted, pushing Christy to the bottom of our hole, covering her as we fell. The mortar landed a good three hundred yards from our position, still close enough to shake the ground and raise the dust. ‘‘Keep down!’’ I shouted. ‘“‘There may be more coming.’ It was fifteen more minutes before the next mortar came in, landing just outside the western perimeter. It

was quiet again for a few minutes, then fire broke out on the eastern side of the camp, SARs and the two machine guns answering Burmese automatic weapons

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that were sending pieces of lead flying through the camp like angry hornets. It was quiet again, and we huddled together in the _ bottom of our semi-foxhole for twenty minutes. When no more firing broke out, I inched my way up to a standing position, looking out over the camp. A couple of buildings had been damaged by the two mortar shells, but it didn’t look like the SIRA had taken any casualties yet. The only sound was the crying of the frightened girls locked in their huts. “It’s not like I thought combat would be.’’ Christy had stood up beside me. ‘‘I thought it would be constant noise, men screaming, grenades and bombs exploding, something quickly done and over with.”’ ‘“*That’s the way Americans and Europeans fight their wars. You can do that if you have lots of money and good supply lines, and you don’t care what kind of casualties you take. They fight a more cautious war in _ the Golden Triangle. They have limited men and ammunition. No commander can afford to lose trained men, and you can’t throw a lot of ammunition around when you have to carry it in by porter.”’ The Burmese commander decided it was time for another mortar round, and we both ducked back down just before it exploded about fifty yards away.

_

They had the range. If it had been an American army out there, we would be in for a hell of a time. The entire camp would have been blanketed with mortars by now. The Burmese forces probably didn’t have more than fifty rounds with them and they had to make those last for at least a week in the field.

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The level of the fighting started to pick up a bit. The next time I peeked over the edge of our miniature stockade I saw casualties; two SIRA men were being helped toward the headquarters building, and one corpse lay on the ground by the crater dug by the last mortar. The crack of assault rifles was almost constant on three sides. The camp had been surrounded in the classic Golden Triangle U-formation, the back door left open so that the final pitched battle could be avoided. It sounds like a chicken shit way to fight a war, but that’s the way they do it in that part of the world. They have been doing it for the last thirty years, and no one has lost, or won, yet. It’s the mercenaries’ dream—constant warfare, noise, and lots of bragging, but only enough death and destruction to keep the adrenaline high. Most engagements go on only as long as it takes to establish who has the best combination of force and position. If the attacking commander decides the position can’t be taken without major casualties, he will back off. If the defending forces decide they can be overrun, they will break and retreat. Vinegar Joe Stillwell spent the entire Second World War trying to convince Chiang Kai-shek to drop those tactics and get more aggressive. Chiang’s leftovers are still fighting the same way. It took six more mortar rounds and five, small fire. fights on the periphery to convince whoever was commanding the SIRA that the time had come to cut and run. Abe’s men weren’t going to stand and fight to the death, but their professionalism still controlled their movements as they started the retreat from the camp.

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I insisted that Christy stay down, but I kept standing, watching the men break from their positions a few at a time and fade back through the camp to the south side, moving out and into the jungle. Twice the orderly break was interrupted by more mortar shells. At least two-thirds of the SIRA men had disappeared out the back door when I saw him, the tattooed sergeant. He was moving low, holding his weapon hiphigh, crossing the parade ground at a run but bent close to the ground. He wasn’t running in our direction; he was heading for the huts where the girls were. He was outside the door of the first hut. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing until he jerked one of the grenades off his chest. The SIRA wanted to keep their own casualties down, but they didn’t give a shit who else died. They were not going to leave anybody behind to be interrogated by the Burmese Army. Tattoo didn’t bother fumbling with the hook that held _ the door closed. He kicked it in and tossed the grenade,

then jumped back. I ducked, too, waiting until I heard the explosion before popping my head back up. The hut was a ruin. The roof had collapsed and some of the thatch was burning. Two or three of the girls were still alive, screaming in pain under the wreckage. Tattoo stood there, watching and listening to the screams for a couple of seconds. He raised the SAR-80 and started firing into the burning ruins, picking out targets by the sounds of the screams. He emptied the twenty-round clip. When he was finished, the only screams were those coming from the other hut. He casually changed clips, turned, and walked toward the

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second hut, the one closest to us. As he walked he carried his rifle in his left hand and reached for the second grenade hanging on his chest. : As I watched Tattoo, I could see other men slipping by my position, continuing the retreat while the sergeant destroyed the evidence. The grenade he threw into the second hut must have rolled under a table or a bed. It blew out the sides of the hut, but left the well-ventilated

roof still standing in

position. It didn’t knock all the women down either. Four of them, bloodied and screaming, came running through the new openings in the sides of the hut. Tattoo stood there, like a hunter in a field after pheasants, his rifle on select fire, picking them off one at a time as

they ran away. I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or if she had seen through a crack in the wall of the hut where we had been put. One girl was running right toward me. The grenade had stripped her clothing off. I could see her breasts covered with specks of blood and bouncing as she came. It was Chu Lai. He did her last. She was only five yards away from our position when massive holes suddenly blossomed where her breasts had been. She jumped forward under the force of the lead, jerking like a fish on a spear. She fell facedown against the sandbags in front of me. Tattoo made sure she had stopped, then he turned back to the second hut. Again, some of the girls inside the wreckage were still alive. He flipped the switch to automatic fire and hosed the ruin down. I knew what he

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would do next. Christy and I would be his last task before he followed the others into the jungle. I could sit and wait for it to come or I could act. | had to try. I was a good twenty yards away, but I thought I had a chance. I braced. As soon as I saw him reach for the empty clip, I was jumping over the sand_ bags and running flat out. The cocky bastard wasn’t looking in my direction, figuring we were meat in a locker he had plenty of time to get to. He had the old clip off and was reaching around in back where a new clip hung on his belt before he heard, then saw me coming. He wasn’t as good as I thought he was. He hesitated a second, trying to decide whether he should finish reloading or drop the rifle and go for the pistol under his arm.

When

he made

up his mind, he didn’t have

time to do either one. I was going to make it. I was going to get a chance to ~ wring the fucking bastard’s neck with my bare hands. I would have done it, too, if the goddamn Burmese Army - hadn’t picked just then to lob in another mortar round. I never heard the whump. I didn’t hear the explosion that knocked me down. I went out, but I don’t know for

how long. It couldn’t have been more than a few sec-onds. The force of the concussion must have thrown me past him, because it took me a second to find him behind me when I opened my eyes. The sergeant was down, too, but recovering faster than I could move. When I located him, he was already getting to his feet. I tried to catch up, but I was too far

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behind him. By the time I worked my way to my knees, he was standing. He was looking down at me, pulling the .357 out of his holster. He was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t hear anything. I was deaf. The fucking sadist decided to play with me a bit. He ~ had the gun in his hand. He motioned me with the barrel to get up. I did. He made an act of pulling back the hammer, then slowly raising the pistol with both hands. He was grandstanding, his finger still outside the trigger guard, daring me to try and cross the distance between us before he killed me. He had just made the fucking biggest mistake of his life. He had forgotten there were two of us. His mistake was understandable. He wasn’t used to thinking about women as human beings. They were there to use like toilet paper, then crumpled and tossed aside or burned once he was finished with them. No one worries about toilet paper fighting back. He had lost his hearing, too, or he would have heard her coming. Christy was running as hard across the parade ground as I had been, coming in from his blind side where I could see her. The Seahawks would have been proud of the home-town girl. It was Superbowl Sunday and she made an open-field tackle. She outweighed him a bit and she hit hard. He fumbled as he went down. I caught the pistol on the fly. Christy let go as soon as they hit dirt. She rolled away from him. I had him covered before he figured out what happened. There wasn’t anything to say or talk about. We didn’t have time for games. I damn sure

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wasn’t going to take prisoners. I executed him, shooting him in the middle of the chest and again in the face as he lay on the ground. I didn’t hear the shots, but I saw the damage the slugs made. I spun, looking around the camp, searching for the attack from others I expected. All I could see were the corpses of the girls. Tattoo was to have been the last one out of the camp. The rest were gone. I looked at Christy who picked herself back up off the ground. I smiled at her and mouthed the word **Thanks.”’ She looked around, and when she saw it was safe, she moved forward for a hug. She was smiling, crying, and, I guess, talking. She looked up at me and said something that her face told me required an answer. I shook my head and pointed to my ears. She understood my problem. I found the SAR-80 that Tattoo had been holding - when the shell landed near us and picked it up. I rolled him over and took the two twenty-round magazines he had on his belt. I double-checked to make sure they were loaded. Looking at the cartridges, it was obvious why poor Chu Lai’s chest had exploded when he shot

“her. The SIRA were loading their own ammunition and - they were using hunting points, not military. What the hell, why should Abe and his boys worry about the Geneva Convention when they were engaged in so many other nasty things? I stripped the ammo belt off the corpse and put it around my own waist so I could carry the extra ammo, the small bayonet, and the

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two canteens he had been wearing. The only other thing worthwhile was a quick-load clip for the pistol. I felt Christy’s hand on my shoulder and I turned back to her. She was holding up the hand she had touched me with, showing me blood from my back. I turned back around and let her check how badly I was wounded. I was surprised I was bleeding. My sense of feeling was as numb as my ears. When she was finished looking at my back, she let me know with her hands it wasn’t all that bad, only a few slivers of shrapnel. She was showing me a sliver she had picked out when all of a sudden she hit me, pushing me to the ground with her on top. I still didn’t hear it, but I felt the ground shake when the mortar struck a hundred yards away. As long as the mortars were coming in, the safest place was where we had been all along. We jumped back into the guard emplacement and I started to fashion a truce flag, which I tied on the end of the rifle barrel. I wanted to let the Burmese Army know we weren’t hostile when they moved into the camp. They never came. I don’t know if the Burmese com-

mander wasn’t aware that the SIRA had fled, if he decided the way in was too well mined to risk a clean-up operation, or if the attack on the camp had been some kind of diversion to keep some of the SIRA pinned down while they attacked elsewhere. They did keep lobbing the mortar shells in every ten or fifteen minutes. Christy was getting pretty good at getting me down in time, but I was worried about the fluke chance of a direct hit in our position. It was time

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to follow our hosts’ example and clear out. The question was whether we should go north or south. The Burmese Army was north and they were supposed to be friendly. But they were shooting at us, and I wasn’t sure we would get a chance to explain who we were if we started up the north trail. There had been reports of white mercenaries working with the Karens, and some local Burmese commander might jump to a conclusion that’s what we were and fire first, then check credentials. If we went south, we would be following along behind the SIRA forces and the last thing I wanted was to meet up with Abe Auerbauch again. But the way they had all hightailed it out suggested they would keep running, probably all the way to the Thai border. That’s where I wanted to be, too, back inside Thailand where I had friends, people I could trust, and a U.S. embassy I could call on the telephone from any .city in the country. Even if we did tie up with the Burmese Army, it would take us several days to walk out, and who knew how long it would take Burmese bureaucracy to decide we were telling the truth and let us call the embassy in Rangoon. I wasn’t positive about our position, bat given the point of our capture, we should be in a corner of Burma where we could reach the Thai border by going either south or east. Even if we were too far north, by going east we would eventually cut across the road between Taungyi and Tachilek. I made the decision; we would move south, going slow so we didn’t catch up with Ap

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Aue Pak’s men. I would take the first trail we crossed going east and hope it led to Thailand. I explained my thinking as best I could with gestures and shouts I couldn’t hear. I hoped I was only temporarily deaf. I figured it would take no more than twentyfour hours to know one way or the other. . I waited until after the next mortar round came in so we could take advantage of the expected lull between rounds before I moved us out toward the south entrance. I gave Christy one of the canteens and the pistol to carry. I kept the assault rifle and the extra magazine. I pushed the lever on the rifle to select fire, then crawled back over the green sandbags with Christy right behind. . I stopped a minute and turned over the body of Chu Lai. I covered her face with the handkerchief I had been going to use for a white flag. I wished we had the time to bury her. What a fucking waste, not just her, but all the other young girls lying dead there in the ruins of the camp. The best revenge we could take would be getting safely back to Thailand so I could make sure that every narcotics and customs officer in the world had Abe Auerbauch’s picture in front of him. I was going to get the bastard one way or another. His heroin empire would turn to shit. I'd make sure of that. As we moved through the camp, I did a quick visual check, hoping to find another weapon or maybe a clip of ammo. Besides the sergeant, three other SIRA dead lay sprawled at different positions around the camp. They all had been stripped of weapons and ammo by

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their buddies, but two had canteens of water that I added to our small collection. I couldn’t hear anything, but my smelling apparatus was working just fine. The stench hit us as we were weaving through the zigzag trail exit out of the camp. The revulsion to the smell must be imprinted in our genes because nothing stinks as bad as a ripe body. I don’t think they meant to leave poor Wilai hanging on that thorn tree, but the Burmese Army had _ interrupted any plans Abe may have had to take him down. This time we both threw up before we got past the mess. We moved slowly. Three times I found trip wires stretched across the trail, booby traps left as. SIRA prizes for any Burmese forces hurrying to catch up. I cut a long piece of inch-thick bamboo with the knife I had taken off Tattoo and whittled a sharp point. I kept “my eyes glued to the ground as we walked along the trail, poking the bamboo into any suspicious-looking ‘soft spots, carefully stepping around them when I found one and motioning Christy to do the same. What worried me most was the possibility of a rear guard left behind by the SIRA to set up ambush posi_ tions. Every time we hit a blind curve or the crest of a hill, Pd drop and crawl through, poking ahead with the -bamboo, leaving Christy behind with the pistol to cover my retreat if that’s what I had to do. We had only made three kilometers or so when it started to get dark. Probing carefully with the stick, I led Christy off the trail ten yards into the jungle and found a spot where we could both sit down. We spent

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the night there, sitting together, providing a mosquito feast while we took turns trying to sleep. ‘*Morgan.’’ It sounded like someone was calling from far away, but the hand shaking my shoulder was proof that she was right there. I had fallen asleep after she had taken the last watch of the night. ‘‘Hi,’’ I said as I opened my eyes. She smiled, then raised her finger to her lips. I guess I had shouted the word, but it sounded like I was whispering. At least my hearing was coming back. ‘“‘Let’s go,’’ I said, standing up. We each took a drink from one of the canteens and started back toward the trail. We still kept moving at the slow pace. Now I was more afraid of running into a SIRA patrol coming back than I was of possible ambushes or mines. About ten o’clock we crossed another trail. The one we were on was heavier traveled, but the second trail led off in an easterly direction. I explained to Christy what I hoped to do, noting my hearing was improving as the sun lifted higher in the sky. We still moved slowly, watching for mines and listening for any sounds of warning. An hour later, Christy grabbed at my shirt from behind. I stopped and turned to look at her. ‘‘Voices,’’ she mouthed more than speaking it, ‘‘up ahead.’’I could hear them, too. We both moved into the jungle, finding places to hide. It was a small group of hill-tribers: three kids, two women, and a man. The turban-like head dressings on the women indicated

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they were Lisu. They were walking down the trail from the direction we were going—chatting, joking, and laughing as they came. We waited ten minutes after they passed before leaving our hiding places to go back to the trail. I tossed the _ bamboo stick aside. The presence of the hill-tribe family had let us know we didn’t have to worry about mines and booby traps any longer. Still, we kept a slow pace, jumping into the jungle a couple of more times to let new groups of people pass by. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when we found the road. We had been climbing the trail going up toward the ridge line. | was out in front still ready for trouble, so I found the road first, running along the ridge line. It wasn’t much—a dirt track that would wash out

every rainy season—but it was a real road, and it showed signs of recent travel. I looked back at Christy still a ways behind, climbing _ up the trail. “‘I think we just made it to Thailand,”’ I ‘called back. ‘‘There’s a road here. This ridge line is probably the border.’’ Christy caught up with me and stood for a minute catching her breath. ‘‘How can you be sure?’’ she asked - between breaths.

‘It must be Thailand,’’ I answered. ‘‘There’s noth‘ing like this on the Burmese side in this area.”’ ‘‘] thought it would be farther,’’ she said. “*T did, too.’’ We were lucky. I was unscrewing the

cap on the last canteen of water and we were both hungry. ‘‘Let’s go that way,’’ I suggested, motioning in the

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direction where the road broke away from the ridge line and started down the opposite side of the mountain from the side we had climbed up. ‘‘Maybe we will get real lucky and run into a Thai border-patrol unit.” For a while we kept hiding whenever we heard anyone coming. But there was a fair amount of traffic on the road; men leading ponies with back packs, families strolling along, twice a couple of fellows on motorcycles. We couldn’t keep hiding forever now that we were in Thailand. Abe Auerbauch and his men would think we were lying dead back in the camp, so they wouldn’t be looking for us. The first couple of people we passed without hiding were Akha, the woman wearing the traditional highcrowned cloth bonnet with a covering of silver coins and an embroidered miniskirt with black-cloth leggings. They stared at us, their mouths gaping as we walked by. **T guess we’re the first Americans they’ve ever seen,”’ Christy said while we continued down the trail. **It’s not that,’’ I answered. “‘This is one of the areas where Thai tourist guides bring people on jungle treks. They have seen lots of white faces, but not one carrying an assault rifle.”’ I stopped and stepped off the side of the road and started to field-strip the weapon. *“What are you doing?’’ she asked. “It’s time to throw this thing away. It will only bring us trouble on this side of the border.’’

I tossed the

different parts in different directions, throwing them as far as I could into the jungle. I saved the two clips for

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last, emptied the ammo out, and tossed each individual round away. Christy was watching me, a question on her lips. “I don’t want some hill-tribe kid to find a working weapon and wipe out his friends playing soldier.”’ She gave me the pistol, which she had been carrying

in her hand most of the time, and I shoved it into my belt underneath my shirt. I wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible, but I didn’t want to go naked. It was almost dark and I was about to suggest we stop for the night, this time with no water to put in our empty stomachs. Before I could make the suggestion we turned a bend and found a large hill-tribe village down the hill away from us. It was bigger than most villages, probably because new families had moved into it to take advantage of the road that twisted through the middle of the village. This was a real village with the sounds of crying - babies, pack animals, gossiping women, and the clang of a hammer pounding on a forge sneaking up the road to greet us. We stood there a moment, just breathing deeply. There was the smell of boiling rice and curries cooking in pots riding the air with the sounds. My stomach _ cheered with a loud growl. ; “Is it safe to go in?’’ Christy asked. ‘*We’ll find the village leader and tell him we were trekking by ourselves and got lost. It’s an Akha village. Some of the tribe are Baptist.”’ A gang of kids and several women saw us coming.

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By the time we got to the village, half the population was out to meet us. The upraised hands of the kids and the shouts of ‘‘one baht, one baht’’ was proof the village was used to farang tourists. A couple of older kids were trying to speak English. I got the idea across to one of them that we wanted to talk to the leader, and he went running off to find him. As far as I was concerned, we were back home again. I was doting on the smiles, the shy glances at the pretty woman beside me, and feeling safer by the minute. I was feeling so safe, I started to play the tourist guide for Christy. ‘*You can tell the single girls from the married women,’’ I explained, ‘“by the bonnet. The ones with high crowns are married; the ones wearing what look like silvered skullcaps are still looking.”’ ‘*And I thought wedding and engagement rings were sexist.”’ I would have told her a few more strange things about the Akhas, like how twins of the opposite sex are expected to grow up and marry, the only permitted violation of some very complicated incest taboos. The village leader walked up before I could get started. He stood about five foot four, which made him one-of the tallest men in the village. He looked about fifty, but

was probably no more than forty or so. He was making enough money off tourists or opium or both that he could afford store-bought clothes and a pair of leather shoes, which he was wearing without socks. He also spoke passable central Thai. I gave him our cover story and asked if someone in

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the village could put us up for the night and feed us. He nodded his head and said he would be most honored if we stayed in his humble dwelling.

We followed him through the village, most of the crowd staying behind. The village looked prosperous, not to Christy, who saw only the poverty, but to me, who had been in a few other villages. About half the houses had tin roofs. There were lots of fat black pigs, their sway backs pushing their bellies almost to the ground. Two of the houses, including the one we were walking toward, had pickup trucks parked beside them, the ultimate evidence of hill-tribe opulence. It was all downhill from here, I thought as we reached the door of the house and our new host motioned us to enter. We would have a hot meal, a good night’s sleep on a bamboo floor, and we would hire our host to take us down the mountain the next morning. Inside the house, which was a large one-room affair with a hardened dirt floor, it was so dark I couldn’t see at first, so it was a couple of seconds before I realized the village leader had just set us up. Somebody coughed painfully off to one side. I peered through what smoke-filtered light there was, my eyes . trying to adjust. There were three people inside—the one who had coughed was lying on the floor wrapped in

a blanket. The other two were standing beside him. Now I could see they held rifles in their hands. The two rifles were pointed at us. ‘‘Welcome to the party. It’s nice of you to join us for

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dinner again.’’ It was the man lying on the floor who spoke. He had a hard time getting it all out, stopping a couple of times to take a noisy, painful breath. It was Abe Auerbauch.

XV.

I still wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. I started inching my hand to my belt, hoping that because I was blocking the light, they might not be seeing too well _ either. I got my hand almost there when a voice barked e“Don’t.’” I think I still would have tried it, preferring to go down fighting, but the voice that had hollered at me, the person in the dark corner holding the rifle that should have been my first target, was very young and female. ‘ Christy, standing behind me, had shifted her position

a bit, letting in more light through the doorway. I could see it was Abi speaking. She was still wearing the jungle uniform and the pearl-handled pistol was still on her belt. The assault rifle she was holding looked gigantic in her small hands. The way she held it suggested 269

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she had learned a lot about using it since we had seen her ride out of the camp. It was pointed at my middle. I raised both hands shoulder-high. The third person in the room, one of Abe’s SIRA soldiers, stepped forward and patted me down. He had to lay down his weapon and use one hand to do it. His left arm and shoulder were wrapped in a large, bloody bandage. He found the pistol in my belt, which he pulled out, and the bayonet, too. He tossed the knife on the ground by the fire and stuck the pistol in his own belt while he searched Christy next. I dropped my hands back to my sides, silently cursing my stupidity in thinking we had gotten home free because we had crossed a border. When he was sure Christy wasn’t carrying a weapon, he walked over and handed the pistol he had taken from me over to Abe lying on the floor. Abe held the pistol up to the fading light, looked at it, coughed again, then looked back at me. ‘So my little mean sergeant is dead. You must be something to have taken him. That’s good. I need a good man.”’ It didn’t seem like the right time to tell him that I hadn’t

taken

the little shit—Christy

had.

Besides,

I

wanted to find out why he was saying he needed-us instead of ordering his man to take us out and shoot us. Abe grunted a command to his soldier, who stepped out of the house and came back a moment later with the village leader in tow. An old Akha crone, wearing an open vest that exposed large, flabby tits, followed behind. Inside, she found a lamp and lit it, then piled a couple of pieces of wood on the embers in the fireplace

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_ in the middle of the room. As the new wood caught, it _ added to the light from the lamp. With the light, I could see that the gray wool blanket covering Abe was soaked with blood. He motioned me over. I knelt down beside him and, when nobody objected, grabbed the blanket and pulled it back. A bloodsoaked bandage covered a large area over his stomach. I carefully lifted a corner of the bandage to check the damage and quickly put it back down when I saw the wound. . ‘It hurts as bad as it looks.’’ He managed to grin at me as he said it. Christy had walked over and stood behind me. Abi was standing there, too, still holding the assault rifle pointed in my direction. From the light of the lamp I could see tear marks plowing through the dirt and the grime on her cheeks. Abe coughed and flecks of blood flew from his lips. He wanted to talk. ‘‘You’re not an idealist, are you,

~ Morgan?”’ I shook my head and he continued. ‘‘Never trust an idealist. That was my mistake. That fucking Sao Tai really believed that shit about Shan nationalism. He betrayed me, so they could get rid of me.”’ It took him a while, and it cost him a lot in pain, but he wanted to tell the story. I’m not sure whether he was trying to win my sympathy or what. Maybe he just wanted his last conversation to be in English. - He and the men who rode out with him had been going straight south to a secret camp where he planned to wait out the Burmese operation. Sao Tai was sup-

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posed to have scouted the way to make sure it was safe. They had ridden into a set ambush. ‘‘They were waiting for us,’’ he coughed out. “‘It had to be that fucking Sao Tai. He betrayed me.”’ Abe was still alive because of Abi. She wasn’t used to horseback riding and had stopped to get down a bit. Abe had let his men ride on ahead while he waited for her, so he had been at the tail end of his little column instead of at the head when the shooting started. The only other man to get out was the soldier with them. Abe bragged about how Abi had used the weapon she was carrying to cover their retreat. They had ridden back north until they hit the same cross trail we had followed. The longer he talked the more it was obvious. The fucking bastard was glad to see us. **You’ll help me, won’t you?”’ Help him—I was sorry it hadn’t been me that put the hole through his belly. He must have read it in my face. “‘Not me, Abi. I can’t leave her here alone.”’ We were still alive because of Abi, not because she had asked her father to let us live, but because he wanted us to take care of her. It made sense; with Abe dead, his daughter would have about the same future that Chu Lai had been given, unless she got out of the Golden Triangle. ‘‘My grandfather wins. He gets what he wants. He always does. You'll take her back, won’t you?’’ That’s the last thing he said. He didn’t die right then, but he did pass out. Abi put the gun down for the first

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time since we had entered and knelt beside her father, holding his hand and crying softly. I felt a nudge on my shoulder and turned to find the old crone standing there holding out a bowl of food. Christy already had one. We found two little stools, the only kind of furniture in the hut, and sat down by the fire to eat. Dinner was brown rice with a chicken curry. The rice was soggy and the pieces of chicken had more bones than meat. Both of us asked for seconds and accepted thirds when the woman offered. **Shouldn’t we be trying to get him a doctor?’’ Christy whispered while we ate. She was the humanitarian, not me. I cared whether he lived or died, but it was the dying side I came down on. Even if I had wanted to help him, it wouldn’t have done much good. It was hard to believe he had hung on as long as he had. ‘*That wound I looked at,’’ I whispered back, “‘it’s _an exit wound.’’ I explained the difference between hunting and military ammo and what a hunting round can do to muscle and flesh, even if it doesn’t hit a bone. “‘If there had been a helicopter handy to airlift him to a field hospital right after he got hit, the doctors might have saved him. It’s too late now,”’ I explained. ‘‘You can already smell the gangrene starting.’’ Christy and [ slept side by side on bamboo mats, listening through most of the night to the tortured breathing of Abe. That suddenly stopped about one o’clock in the morning and the smell of human feces filled the

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room. Abe Auerbauch was dead, thirteen years after he was supposed to have died. We and the Akha villagers helped Abi bury her father

the next morning on a hill near the village. We didn’t mark the grave. Abe had told Abi that’s what he wanted before we had blundered into their hiding place. Abe would still be missing by choice. The SIRA soldier had disappeared shortly after the death of his general, either to return to his home or to

find a new flag to fight under. The village leader drove us down the mountain and into the city of Chiang Rai. We got there in time to buy three seats on the afternoon Thai Airways flight to Chiang Mai. The late-afternoon sun was playing with the clouds, hiding behind one of the distant thunderheads and turning the whole sky dark gray, then popping out and sending visible rays in light jumping across the sky, switching the color in patches of clouds from gray to cotton-white. Another twenty minutes and we were going to have an absolutely marvelous sunset. I reached down and picked up the gin and tonic sitting on the sand beside me and took a sip while I watched the girl who was wading in the quiet surf look for seashells. She was wearing a new white-and-redstriped swimming suit that accented the beginnings of her breasts. The swimsuit bared her shoulders, showing a fading blue bruise on the front just above the armpit.

She found something and picked it up, looked at it, giggled, and came running to show it to the woman sitting beside me.

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‘‘Look, Christy,’’ she squealed in delight. ‘‘What is it?” “‘A sand dollar. It’s a kind of starfish.’’ The girl added it to the little pile of small shells lying on the sand between Christy and me. She turned and ran back into the ocean, her feet splashing as she entered the water. “‘If it weren’t for that bruise on her shoulder, I wouldn’t believe it was the same girl we brought out of that village,’’ Christy said, looking at me. “‘That’s kids for you,’’ I answered. ‘‘There’s an angel and a devil in all of them, at least the ones that are worth anything.”’ Christy was wearing the same sun suit she had bought on our first trip to Pattaya. Both of us were sitting under a beach umbrella on a couple of aluminum and plasticwebbed beach chairs I keep at the bungalow. She sipped 7 a bit on her rum and Coke, then looked my way. “‘T wonder how she will adjust, living in the United . States? It will be so different from anything she’s known before.”’ “*By the time that rifle-kick bruise completely fades, she’ll be well on her way, learning to use lipstick, getting her hair done in the latest style, flirting with the boys in her class. Besides that, she’ll be rich, and the

‘rich always live well.’ “‘T guess you’re right,’’ Christy conceded. *‘When I talked to J. J. this morning, he told me he’s arranged for a full-time tutor to work the rest of the spring and the summer. By next fall she ought to be ready to start high school, and it won’t be a public school.”’

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The red-orange colors started to show above us. We sat, not saying anything else, watching the kaleidoscope sky and the girl both at play. About the time the colors started to fade in the west, Ari came down to the beach to tell us that dinner was ready. We ate barbecued shrimp and red snapper on my porch—Christy and I sitting together on one side and Abi on the other. Ari had put mosquito coils under the table in strategic spots to keep the bugs away and we

took our time eating. Dinner conversation was question-and-answer time, with Abi asking and Christy trying to answer on subjects ranging from what American girls wore to school to whether or not Springsteen ever appeared in concert in Seattle. It would still happen but less often: Abi would fade out for a minute, her eyes growing sad, remembering.

When we finally got back to Bangkok, we had found that her mother, Toy, was still on ice, so we had done the whole Buddhist funeral bit with three days of chanting monks and a cremation on the day before we headed for Pattaya. I had arranged for the old grandparents to come down to Bangkok for the funeral. Boonma handled the negotiations with them over Abi’s future. They would benefit, too, from Abi’s good fortune—if you can call losing two parents in a two-week period good fortune. Christy and I had to spend several hours with the DEA boys at the embassy, telling what we knew about Abe Auerbauch’s heroin empire. His death meant the

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end of the SIRA, but it wouldn’t have much impact on the amount of heroin going into the U.S. Somebody else would be right there to take over. The trip to Pattaya had been my suggestion, a way to kill a few days while the lawyers handled the paperwork of proving Abi had a claim to American citizenship. This was the last night. Abi would get her passport the next day and then the two of them would be flying back to Seattle. With the young girl in tow, Christy started worrying about setting an example. In Bangkok, that meant renting three hotel rooms, so Abi could have her own. That made it possible for Christy to spend the daytime pre_ tending she and I were just friends while we let one of the rooms sit empty all night. My bungalow only has two bedrooms, so the first night in Pattaya, Christy told me she would have to stay in the same room with Abi. Twenty minutes after I had _ slipped into bed, she had come through the door. _ “Change your mind?”’ **Abi changed it. When she saw that I was planning on sleeping with her, she asked if you and I were mad at each other. She’s already got it all figured out. I _ decided the only one I was fooling was myself.’’ I had tried to talk Christy out of going back to Seattle. The last night, while we were lying in the bed in my room, I tried again. ‘‘T thought you didn’t like partners,’’ she snickered. ‘‘T never had anybody apply before who could throw a running tackle like you can.”’

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She shook a bit, remembering it. ‘‘I surprised myself. I remember thinking, What the hell, if he can try it, so can I.”’ We had already made love once and we were resting in between. ‘*So,”’ I said, ‘‘why not stay here?”’ ‘*You tempt me, but I would be giving up too much.”’

‘“You mean working for a sadistic old man, running his errands and calling it a career?”’ “It’s not that. I guess in a-way I want the same things you insist on—personal freedom, self-sufficiency, control of my own life. But the only way I can do that is by paying my own bills. I bargain a part of my life away each week to somebody like J. J. so I can do anything I want to do the rest of the time.”’ ‘*And doing what you want doesn’t include a man?”’

**It does if he’s the right kind of man and he’s in the right place. You half qualify. Why don’t you give this screwy existence of yours up and go back to Seattle? We could be together all the time. I could get you a job at Consolidated. Of course, you would have to shave off that beard.”’ She wasn’t asking me to do that. She knew I couldn’t. She was helping me see why what I was asking her was

every bit as impossible. We lay there a little while. ‘‘Morgan?’’ she whispered, turning in my direction and moving in close, her hand reaching out to touch me. ‘‘Let’s take what we have, even if it’s only tonight.’’ She was really screwing with my mind, quoting my own hedonistic philosophy back at me.

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There’s a place on the third floor at Don Muang Airport where you can stand and watch through a plateglass window while the planes take off. I stood there surrounded by a family of Indians, the women dressed in bright purple and pink saris and the men wearing white turbans, all of us looking out onto the runway. They turned and left as soon as the Air India jet lifted off the runway. . I stayed to watch the Thai International 747 waiting for clearance. It started to roll. It was right in front of the terminal when it hit flight speed and the front wheels lost contact with the ground. I stood and watched until it was nothing but a speck in the sky. Back in the parking lot, I found the rental car I had used to bring Christy and Abi to the airport. The drive _ back into Bangkok was lonely. The bungalow in Pattaya _ would be even more lonely. I was in no hurry to get back to that. ' | decided to stay the night in the city. Maybe later I would hit Patpong Road. What I needed to forget wasn’t whiskey. _

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|

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SOME MEN ARE MISSING IN ACTION ONE WAS MISSING BY CHOICE J. J. Auerbach was rich enough to have anything he wanted. Now he wanted confirmation. Retired Special Forces Major, Bumper Butz, had come to Auerbach and_ told him that his grandson was alive, a prisoner in Laos. All Morgan Adams had to do was prove it. He'd get fifty. grand and Butz would get financing for a rescue operation.

Adams doesn't like Auerbach, knows that the MIA issue is a political football without any basis in reality, and doesn’t want the job. He does like Christy Ham-

mond, however, Auerbach’s beautiful administrative assistant. ..the woman who will accompany him back to Thailand and act as liaison. What the hell, right? ~ Wrong! It doesn’t take long for Adams to discover that there is at least one American in a tiger cage—and it’s him. He also discovers that Auerbach’s grandson is still alive. In fact, he’s the one holding Adams ane oe prisoner. :

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

| 51206

gm

7145°00550"" ISBN

4

O0-&12-Siche—-5