The boy dropped his shirttail. “You look troubled, Mark my friend from America.”
“Well, I just got here, and I got assigned these living quarters. And I went to the address they told me, and the place I’m supposed to live in has all these people in it. Must be a whole family in there. I’ve got to talk to somebody. Get this straightened out.”
The boy spat. “Squatters. Refugees from fighting in the countryside. Everybody wants to live in Saigon giai phong. I will take you to someone who will make it right.” He puffed out his chest importantly and led off down the street.
They went two blocks, Mi proud, Mark ducking his head between his shoulder-blades in a doomed attempt to be inconspicuous. They turned a corner and a burst of automatic-weapons fire cracked out right in front of them, followed by the slap of muzzle-blast shocks hitting the building fronts.
Mark grabbed Mi by the arm and dragged him into a recess between two more or less solid-looking structures. He was getting to be an old hand under fire. Hell of a note for the Last Hippie.
Mi squirmed. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to keep you from getting shot.”
Mi pulled free. “There is no danger. They fire only into the air.” His body language said he knew a little something about being under fire too.
Mark was becoming aware that he was standing in somebody’s front yard, as blank joker faces stuck out of the lean-to jumble set back from the street between the larger buildings. All stepped right out into the street. Mark peered cautiously after. The loose horse hairs were starting to itch down inside his shirt, and he remembered he was allergic to horses.
Another burst crashed. Mark flinched but willed himself not to duck. Men in khaki shorts and pith helmets were herding people out of a building down the street, slapping and kicking and firing Kalashnikovs into the air to keep them moving.
“See?” All said smugly. “It is the People’s Security Force clearing out squatters. They think they can come here and take the housing the government gives to jokers.”
The PSF troops were bundling the squatters into the back of a big black step-van. A young man suddenly broke away, went running down the street, thatch of stiff black hair bouncing to the rhythm of his stride, elbows flailing.
One of the men in the pith helmets pulled an AK to his shoulder and fired. Dust flew from between the young man’s shoulder-blades. He fell on his face, skidding several yards on the sidewalk. The security man fired again. Screams answered, as if his bullets had found other targets.
Au showed Mark a smile full of white, well-tended teeth. “Nat dogs. They deserve no better, yes?”
Chapter Sixteen
The hunt for Mark Meadows stalled out in Bangkok, on the pool deck of the Oriental Hotel. The dogs, however, were not as idle as they looked.
“This isn’t gonna work, Lynn,” Gary Hamilton said. He had a mostly peach Hawaiian shirt on over khaki shorts and flip-flops. He sat on a big plastic chaise longue, keeping carefully within the umbra of an umbrella, applying thermo-nuclear-blast-protection-factor sunblock over every inch of his large body and worrying.
“What’s not gonna work?” his partner demanded. Lynn Saxon sat cross-legged right up on the pink pavement by the pool. He had a headset clamped on his dark hair and a little black box well equipped with blinking lights and digital displays resting next to his skinny, hairy haunches. He wore matching Hawaiian shirt and shorts dominated by an explosive shade of magenta. The Aussie tending bar in the little straw-top cabana over on the other side of the pool had opined that looking at Saxon gave him a whole new grasp of the phrase Technicolor yawn. Unlike college-boy Hamilton, Saxon had never been a member of any beer-drinking fraternities, so he felt vaguely complimented by the remark.
Rubbing thick white zinc-oxide cream on his nose, Hamilton glanced sideways at his buddy and inhaled a snort of laughter. He had been fighting off the giggles all morning. He didn’t see Lynn get zinged much. It was especially great when he didn’t even know it.
“Just sitting around listening to Belew’s phone in case he happens to get a call telling him where Meadows is hanging out,” Hamilton said. “What good is this doing us?” Saxon was hot, wired, and running, flipping those channels on his Black Box and alternately ogling the women of various colors in their French thong bikinis and shrieking curses at them if they splashed too near to his sensitive electronic equipment.
“Listen, bud,” he said, talking fast and emphatically. “Do you have any idea, any idea at all, where this puke Meadows is?”
Warily, Hamilton shook his head.
“Right! Neither do I, neither does Washington. It’s been good old J. Bob all along who’s been steering us after him. I mean, we gotta admit, when he’s right, he’s right. Right?”
“Right. Er, yeah.”
Saxon bobbed his head. “Okay, now. When we found out Meadows was headed east with the gunrunners, we all agreed he was going to try to set himself up in charge of a drug lab for some big Asian operation, probably in the Golden Triangle. Now, we’ve been sweltering in this combination steam-bath and sewer two whole days now, and J. Bob has been running around playing Secret Agent Man and slipping the old Spam Loafski to Mistral, while all we do is sit by the pool sipping Mai Tais, playing with our wing-wangs, and praying for the Eurasian babes to fall out of their swimsuits. You following this?”
In fact the very different personalities of Belew and Helen Carlysle had caused both to be extremely discreet about their nascent affair. But Saxon had noticed that the two had begun to adhere into a mini-bloc opposed to him and Hamilton. Carlysle had certainly shut Saxon down in no uncertain terms, and what that added up to for Saxon was that either Mistral was getting it from Belew or she was a dyke. She hadn’t exactly dropped her drawers in response to Hera’s come-ons in Athens. That left one possibility. QED.
“I suppose you think Belew is in cahoots with Meadows,” Hamilton said sullenly.
Saxon flipped his shades up on top of his dark hair and gazed at Hamilton for a long moment before flipping them down again. A corner of his mouth worked. Hamilton wanted to yell at him. Saxon did that with his mouth when he was being clever. Hamilton hated it when he was clever.
“Well-ll,” Saxon said, “I guess we can’t entirely discount that little possibility, now, can we? I mean, he is with the Company after all, and who set most of these ethnic-army drug lords up in business in the first place? Can you say, C-I-A? Sure. I knew you could.”
At that point a five-foot-tall woman with red hair hanging to a perfect butt and green eyes shaped like almonds dove off the board. Water droplets hit Saxon on the hand and cheek. One splattered on the precious Black Box.
“Hey, you stupid cunt!” he shrieked when she surfaced. “Watch out what the fuck you’re doing!”
Treading water, she glared for a moment, then laughed and dogpaddled away, her mostly naked rump protruding slightly from the water and just working away. “Stuck-up bitch,” Saxon snarled. “If we were back in the USA
Hamilton cleared his throat.
“Oh. Yeah.” Saxon rubbed his upper lip where the stubble from his returning mustache itched him. “So anyway, the real deal with our friend J. Bob is that this is his old playground, and he knows a lot of the big kids on it, and he knows a lot of the little ones too. If Southeast Asia really is where Meadows has gone to ground, you and me and the dink shining shoes over there all know J. Bob’s gonna sniff him out first.”