The third officer stepped to a rickety wooden table and held up a pair of big alligator clips, dangling from thick red-and-black cables. “We were simply softening him up before we put these on, sir,” he said brightly.
“Oh, so? And perhaps even as we speak you are having an iron maiden brought up from the basement? A rack, maybe?”
He plucked the cables from the PASF man’s limp fingers. “The first important rebel leader to fall into our hands, and you interrogate him with this?”
The trio wilted into the collars of their summer-weight tan uniforms. They knew what was coming. In the complicated food chain of the Vietnamese internal-security apparatus, the People’s Public Security Force occupied a much higher niche than PASF And PPSF was a noted credit-jumper.
The colonel signaled. A pair of basic leg-breakers in PPSF khaki lumbered in. They undid the heavy leather straps that bound the now-unconscious Cao Dai leader to the chair, put hard hands under his armpits, hoisted him up, and hauled him out with his bare toes scraping on the cement floor.
“The Socialist Republic is grateful for your efforts on her behalf,” Vo said in his horrible voice, taking another drag on his cigarette. “She is also grateful your clumsiness did not deprive her of such a valuable prize. Good day.”
He threw the cigarette down beside the green-patinated drain grating in the middle of the floor and walked out.
“Have a nice day,” the squat joker said to his back. The door slammed shut.
“Tight-assed Northern cocksucker,” the second officer hissed. The PASF men were all Annamese, local boys.
“Did you hear his voice?” the third one asked. “He spoke as if he had a cleft palate. Chilling.”
The first nodded sagely. “It’s true, what they say of him.”
“Arrogant Tonkinese piece of shit,” the second said.
“One of those men he had with him didn’t even look Vietnamese,” the third officer said indignantly. “He looked … Korean.” He practically spat the last word.
“Indeed.” The first officer stood staring at the door. “A wise man might wonder why loyal officers of the state such as ourselves should run like dogs to the summons of a Northerner with a broomstick up his rectum,” he said at length.
“That’s true!”
“Injustice, that’s all it is.”
“Has it ever been different, since the Tonkinese won their Short Victorious War?” the first officer went on quietly.
“Not for one day!” agreed the second quickly. He wasn’t a weatherman, but he knew which way the wind blew.
“That’s right!” said the third, who didn’t, yet, but was determined to let it carry him along withal.
“War of Liberation, they called it,” the first officer said, his spine uncurling from the beaten slump Vo had put into it. “War of conquest is more like it, wouldn’t you say?”
The third jumped as if the alligator clips had leapt off the table and bit him. “But that’s —”
“Loyalty,” the first officer said, clearly and firmly. “Loyalty to our homeland — Annam. It is time to recognize invasion for what it is, violation for what it is.”
“We must be men,” the second officer said. “We must refuse to be victimized.” He’d been reading American self-help texts as part of his study plan.
“Absolutely!” the third man almost yelled. He’d finally gotten the drift and hoped the others wouldn’t interpret plain slow-wittedness as dissent. “Men! Not, uh, not dogs.”
“There is,” the first officer said, “but one thing to do.”
And they all three turned as one to the horrid Lien Xo joker, who had stood there throughout it all not understanding a word that was said, and smiled. He smiled back with his grotesque leathery lips.
“Thank you,” the first officer said, in English again. “You have been of great help. Return to your unit now and tell your colonel to await our report.”
“In Hell,” the second officer said in Vietnamese, as the being shambled out.
Because the three shared a single thought with total clarity: that night they were going to slip away across the paddies and join the rebels. The answer was blowing in the wind.
Ngo An Dong was unfortunate enough to come partially back to himself as the Soviet-made GAZ jeep pulled away from the police station and its bad suspension began to jolt his tailbone. He had osmotically absorbed the fact that he had fallen from the rice pot into the cook-fire.
The two who had hauled him from the interrogation room were sitting up front. There was something vaguely familiar about the back of the driver’s head; it seemed kind of square for a Vietnamese head, somehow. Ngo had gone to Saigon University after he got out of the Army, and was fairly sophisticated; he assumed the blow to his head had broken something and he was hallucinating. He hoped a subdural hematoma would finish him before the legendary Colonel Vo got him to wherever he was taking him.
The colonel sat beside him, which struck him odd somehow. He made himself turn to look his future tormentor squarely in the eye.
And screamed.
There was no Vo. Instead a man sat beside him wrapped in a black cape, grinning at him from the depths of a cowl. His face was hairless. It was also blue.
“Those assholes swallowed my act hook, line, and sinker. Did you see that, Kim?” He reached forward to grab the driver’s shoulder.
Kim Giau Minh, playing the driver, nodded his head. The cowled man settled back in the rear seat. Ngo caught a glimpse of what seemed millions of tiny lights in his cape. Lights like … stars.
“I’m slick,” he said, rubbing blue hands together, “so slick. I don’t see why Mark doesn’t choose me more. I’m really a lot more useful than the others. Much more versatile. Don’t you agree?”
Ngo nodded, though it made his head ring like a temple bell. The apparent fact of his escape from torture, degradation, betrayal, and death was beginning to penetrate the fog. If the blue man had asked him to confirm that he was Queen Victoria — another celestial personage for the Cao Dai — he would have nodded too.
The blue man looked at him closely. “Say, you wouldn’t have a sister, would you? I don’t get out too often.”
Dawn was graying-out the clouds over distant jungle. The patrol boat prowled between banks covered in grass grown thick and high from the summer monsoon. The crew kept their thumbs on the firing-switches despite the fatigue of a night’s patrol. The half hour before the sun actually popped the horizon was prime time for ambushers.
The boat was a Soviet copy of an old American RAG — River Assault Group — design, made especially for the Border Guards Directorate of the KGB. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan it had been retired from service on Central Asia’s Amu Dar’ya, where it and others of its class had been engaged in trying to prevent arms from being smuggled south cross river to the ’Stan, and dope from coming north. The boats had not been a conspicuous success in either endeavor. But the Vietnamese armed forces were intent on resembling the Americans they had outlasted a decade and a half before as closely as possible, so they just had to have the craft when they hit the market.
The rating drowsing upright in the forward twin 12.7 mount jerked fully awake. “Did you feel that? Did you?” he demanded in a shrill voice, tracking the gun barrels left and right at the mist rising off the river.
The warrant officer in command stuck his head out of the armored cabin. “What’s going on?” he yelled over the engine throb.
“I felt something hit us! Didn’t you feel it?”
“Vang!” yelled the man from the after-machinegun mount. “Yes! I felt it too.”