“An innerspring mattress! King-size! We’ve got as much right to one as the American plutocrats. And one bed with equal representation for all!” The rebel girl stood her ground.
“Now look,” I told the Saigon chick. “If we’re going to get this orgy off the ground, you’ll have to put your prejudices aside. One large bed seems fair enough to me.”
“You’re selling me out!” she protested.
“Let her stay out,” the canny North Vietnamese suggested. “We’ll just make it a three-way orgy.”
“If I’m out, she’s out!” The Saigon girl pointed a quivering finger at the NLF nymph.
“Oh, no!” I protested. “I ‘don’t swing that way! He and I are not going to make this scene alone. You two will just have to cooperate.”
“I’m cooperating,” the Cong lass said sweetly. “I’m willing to get into bed with the three of you.”
“So am I,” the man from Hanoi said.
“And so am I,” I decided. “And if you don’t,” I told the Saigon holdout, “I’m going to go out and find another girl to replace you.”
She was still mumbling about being sold out as she finally crawled under the blankets of the king-size bed with the rest of us. “Whose hand is that on my groin?” she demanded after a moment.
“What difference does it make. This is an orgy,” I reminded her.
“Well, it’s squeezing awfully hard, and I don’t trust--”
“It’s mine,” I admitted.
“You’re the one I don’t trust most!” Saigon was bitter.
“It’s a caress,” I told her.
“That’s what I mean. That American caress turns into a pubic stranglehold before you can say Nhu3 !”
“Ky4 ,” I reminded her.
“Thieu5 ,” she corrected me.
“Don’t spit.”
“Can it that even Saigon is learning the nature of American friendship,” Hanoi interjected sarcastically. The Cong giggled.
I shifted position and stroked one of the Cong’s high, sharp breasts. She responded by kissing me. Meanwhile Saigon was bypassing me to make overtures to Hanoi. The Cong’s lips slid down my chest in a series of shiver-producing kisses. I put my hand on the back of her neck and pushed her lower. “Yeah!” I told her, my body tensing. “That’s it!”
But the Cong stopped to raise her head to Hanoi for a moment. “Will I lose face?” She asked his advice.
“Not if Saigon makes the same concession,” Hanoi answered, climbing over both the Cong and me to deal directly with Saigon.
Now the pattern of the sex truce was emerging. The Cong had me pinned down, was calling forth all of my erotic resources, which were being concentrated at the very spot where she was poised to deplete them. At the same time, I was stretching my neck to devour Saigon. Hanoi, steeped in Ho Chi Minh6 tactics, was attacking Saigon from the rear while at the same time stirring up the Cong’s passions with a finger that was being tantalizingly dipped and withdrawn.
After pursuing these courses for a while, as if by tacit agreement, we all shifted position. My head was buried in the fleshy quicksand of Saigon’s large breasts, my mouth eager and busy, but also gasping for breath as the velvety orbs seemed to envelop me. The Cong was at my rear, nibbing, scratching, biting, prodding the nether regions of my body. Her head was thrown back to receive sustenance from Hanoi who was crouched over her and holding her by the ears. Saigon kept trying to interpose her clutching womanhood between him and the Cong.
Again we shifted. Now Saigon crouched on all fours while I pounded her from the rear. The Cong lay flat beneath her, reaching up to squeeze Saigon’s breasts hard. Her legs were wrapped around Hanoi’s neck to allow him easy access to the area of her soft underbelly. We continued in this way, mindlessly, until there was a mutual four-way explosion so powerful that it actually broke the springs of the bed under us and sent us sprawling to the floor.
We were exhausted, our energies depleted, our resources drained, our strength of mind itself gone. We hadn’t the will to continue the orgy; we hadn’t the will not to continue it either. Rest was indicated, but we seemed incapable of rest as well. What was past threatened to flaunt our dreams, considerations of the future rendered us sleepless, and the present was hopeless ennui with the rumblings of war and destruction still growing closer beyond the door. So we stayed motionless, inactive, un-thinking, uncaring.
We were still in our state of oblivion when the door to the cellar burst open. A barrage of tommygun bullets was sprayed down the stairs. We made no move to avoid them, but miraculously none of the four of us was hit.
The barrage was followed by a dozen Cong coming down the stairs on the run. Their first impulse was obviously to shoot us where we lay. Only curiosity stayed their blood-lust. They hadn’t expected to run into what was obviously the aftermath of an orgy in the middle of a battle. One who seemed to be a leader, shouted out an order, and the others refrained from shooting. However, they did keep their guns trained on us.
The leader addressed the Viet Cong girl in their native tongue. She answered him. It was easy to see that she was sorting out our various positions for him. The North Vietnamese officer interjected something, but the Cong leader seemed to have some doubts as to whether or not he and the girl guerilla might not be defectors. Finally the two of them were led off by three of the Cong.
That left me and the South Vietnamese secretary. The leader stood us up against a wall and backed away. His men lined up facing us. There was no doubt about what was coming. This was a firing squad we were facing, and the execution was about to commence.
The leader barked out a command. I don’t speak Vietnamese, but it wasn’t hard to fathom it by the response. “Ready . . .” His men raised their guns. Beside me the Saigon girl was sobbing.
“Aim . . .”
I was feeling a mite teary myself. It was all so sudden. I would have liked a little time to put my affairs in order . . . or to beg for my life . . . or something. My body tensed, waiting for the final word and the impact of the bullets which would follow it.
But the word never came. It died on his lips. And he died with it there, unspoken. He died of lead poisoning, administered by a machinegun fired from the head of the stairs.
The short burst was followed by a hand grenade. It was tossed just to the rear of the firing squad. They were still trying to swing around to counter the sudden attack when the grenade exploded.
They took the full impact. However, since the hurler had been careful to toss it to the rear of them, the girl and I emerged from the blast shaken but unharmed.
There were footsteps running down the stairs now, and as the smoke cleared I could make out the figure of a large man in civvy clothes mopping up the bits and pieces of the firing squad with a machinegun. Then there was silence as he looked at us and we looked back at him across the bodies of eight dead Cong.
“You folks okay?” he asked finally.
“Yeah.” I found my voice.
“You an Amurrican?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I am South Vietnamese. I work here at the Embassy as a secretary,” the girl identified herself.
“Those degenerate Commie sadists!” Our rescuer was angry. “They stripped you down before they were ready to murder you, hey? Those Red perverts!”
I didn’t bother to correct him. I found my pants and put them on while the South Vietnamese secretary got back into her clothes. I was still adjusting to the fact that I was miraculously still alive, and it took a few minutes before I was able to express my gratitude to our rescuer.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said finally. And that was the truth.
“Hell! Don’t try. I just happened to stumble in here and see the fix you were in, and I did what anybody would have done.” He moved closer, and I saw that he was older than I’d thought at first. In his mid-fifties, I judged, with steel-gray hair and the large, muscular body of a man who makes it a point to keep in shape. “What’s your name, son?”