Death Chants (7 page)

The old Indian put
his pipe in his shirt pocket with an air of putting it away forever. "I died in a hundred movies
and I never felt like I feel now that I'm actually doing it."

"If it feels like
you've had to go to the bathroom for five years, and can't, you and me are in the same movie,"
said Forbes.

"Death may turn out
to be funny. I hope not too damn funny. If there is a happy hunting ground and we go there, John
Forbes, it better by Christ not be a movie set."

Forbes started to
take a drink from Red Horse's beer.

"Hell, don't worry
about it. If it is, you're a personal friend of
the director, and we'll get ourselves a rewrite." He lifted Red Horse's can of beer to
his lips. "I already got a good idea how to redo our death scene."

Red Horse lunged
forward and grabbed his arm at the wrist.

He said, "There is
no death, only a change of worlds." He snatched the beer can out of Forbes's hands. "AND IN THE
NEXT WORLD, BRING SOME OF YOUR OWN DAMN BEER."

The Marine band
played the Air Force hymn loud enough to scare the eagle.

He wasn't happy in
the cage anyway—no eagle ever is.

When I stepped off
the chopper at Camranh Bay, the caged eagle under my arm made me conspicuous.

Colonel Ranklin, a
very correct soldier, impeccably starched, met me with a jeep at the end of the pier. The smell
of the harbor, a heavy tang of oil and salt water mingled with sewage, struck my
nostrils.

"I have orders to
take you to your next transport," said Colo­nel Ranklin, saluting smartly.

There was a look of
displeasure on his face. He expected possibly high brass, or somebody with a high covert status,
anything but a long-haired Indian with a caged eagle.

I got into the
jeep, glad to drop the cage. I had a couple of wounds where the eagle had got at me through the
bars.

"You are the
Mystery Guest?"

"I guess so. I've
got a name, too—call me Lookseeker. You can't blame the code name on me. They always make a game
out of everything."

"Right," said
Colonel Ranklin, climbing into the jeep. He threw the jeep into gear and we were off. He never
looked back, driving at a half-slow and very cautious pace through the dock area. We threaded our
way through what seemed like millions of tons of military cargo, awaiting
transshipment.

He kept his back
straight; perhaps he had been born with a back like that, formed to fit against the
wall.

There was a
coldness about him I didn't like, and he hadn't asked for proper identification or shown his own,
either.

They had issued me
a standard sidearm, but I had turned it in. Where the eagle and I were going, guns wouldn't help.
But now,
pondering the silent figure
driving the jeep, I felt threatened and wished I had a weapon.

We went past a
large storage shed and he turned the wheel abruptly to the right.

Two men lounging
beside the shed sprang into action. They jerked on ropes and a steel shuttered door slid up. The
jeep slowed, righted itself, and we shot into the open doorway.

As soon as we had
made it inside, the heavy doors clanged shut behind us with a bang.

The lights went on,
flooding the dimly lit interior with blazing light.

A tall man in a
business suit sat on a chair, flanked by heavily armed men of the 315th Air Commando
Group.

My driver got out
of the jeep and walked away, not looking back. He lit a cigarette and strolled behind a stack of
ammo cases.

"Don't bother
getting out of the jeep, Lookseeker," said the tnan in civilian clothes. "I won't keep you very
long."

"Who are you? Why
am I being detained?"

The man winced.
"Hardly detained. Let us say, momentarily delayed. I'm Hightower. I'm with the CIA."

"Somehow, I'm not
surprised," I said.

"You know, this is
a war we could win. I want you to know that I honestly believe that. I don't think I would like
to see it end prematurely. We still need more time."

I studied him. He
had a lean face, a killer's face, but a kind of sadness suffused his features. He projected a
fatherly aura, ra­diating charm and warmth that probably did not exist.

"What does this
have to do with me?" I asked. The eagle shrieked and flung itself at the bars of its cage as it
had done many times before.

He smiled and I
felt a cold wind, as if something had stirred ilie air above a grave. "Let us say that civilized
as we may seem, America is no more civilized than we choose to be. Do we make war with logic and
precision and science? The Pentagon would have us believe so. But you and I, Lookseeker, we know
differ­ently. Hitler had his astrologers. Eisenhower had a rabbit foot in his pocket throughout
the war. War brings out the mystic need lor answers in the most civilized men."

"I am surprised.
You seem to know what my mission is. I was told that no one would know," I said and I knew this
was truly a dangerous man. And a dying man as well. I could feel it, almost see it glowing
beneath his skin, an unstoppable cancer, a shadow riotously burgeoning with dark
unlife.

"How I know is
unimportant. But make no mistake about it, my friend, I am deeply concerned by what you are about
to do. I don't like it. I detest it just as I detest all of the tired old mystical, religious
mumbo jumbo of the past. I am an irreligious man. Winning is my religion."

"If you were to ask
me, I would say you are a very religious man," I said, borrowing some of the eagle's wisdom. "If
you were not, you would not so deeply fear what I am about to do."

The man jerked as
if struck. His face grayed and he looked down at his hands. They were white, long and pale, like
blind worms from a subterranean cave. There was a pallor about the man that suggested that he
seldom saw the sun, sitting like a spider in his dark web, spinning dark nets to entrap his
prey.

"Perhaps you are
right," he said and he looked at me strangely. "You are not what I expected."

He looked at me
carefully, as if trying to figure out just how dangerous I was by the way I looked.

I did not make an
intimidating figure. I have long, black, very unmilitary hair. I am not tall, neither am I
particularly hand­some. My face is too thin, my eyes are too large with things that walk through
the thousand thousand dark nights of man. The military uniform I wore was much too big for me.
Hollywood would never have cast me as a warrior or a medicine man. In my own way, though, I was
both.

"I think you
expected to see an old man, rattling skulls and waving feathers and chanting mysterious chants.
Something like that."

"Yes." His smile
was almost real now. "Perhaps, if you looked like a fake, I might be more inclined to dismiss you
as a childish whim on his part."

"What do you want
with me? I don't think you have the au­thority to stop me, if that's what you've got in
mind."

"I could kill you,"
he said smoothly, his tone devoid of menace. "A sniper. This area is hit so often with snipers,
we call them duty snipers. I could arrange it."

Colonel Ranklin had
returned. He seemed nervous, a ciga­rette burning in the corner of his mouth. I noticed he had
one hand on the butt of his sidearm.

"I'm sure you
could," I said and then I lost all fear of High-tower, suddenly knowing he was just scared.
Terrified. Of me, of what I stood for.

I motioned to
Colonel Ranklin. "Let's go, driver. We've wasted enough time here."

Hightower stood up,
moving angrily toward the jeep. He put his hand on the door of the jeep, his mouth set in a grim
line.

"I haven't said you
could go yet. I haven't decided if you'll ever go."

"Yes, you have." I
felt sorry for him. "Because you want to know the answer as badly as the man who sent me. You'd
kill me because you wanted to change the answer, that I believe, but you'd never kill me knowing
that I may be the only one who can reveal the answer. You are more afraid of not knowing than
knowing."

Colonel Ranklin now
had his weapon out.

Hightower turned
and looked back at him. Ranklin waited for an order.

"Drive him," said
Hightower.

Ranklin looked
disappointed as he reholstered his gun. The heavy doors went up and Ranklin got back into the
jeep.

Hightower put his
hand on my arm, like a supplicant seeking favor from the gods. "Don't tell anyone I talked to
you. I'd appreciate it." The sadness was on his face again.

"Who would I tell,"
I said as the jeep began backing out of the shed. "I never met you, and if anyone asks why we're
late, I'll tell them Colonel Ranklin stopped to pay a visit to a whorehouse to pick up his
laundry and have his back ironed straight in the usual military fashion."

I heard Hightower
laughing as we drove away. Even laughing, the man sounded scared.

Ranklin never spoke
again. I knew he was a skilled assassin, and looking at him, I looked to see how he would die.
The great
lizard spoke to me and I saw
Ranklin in a bar, drinking with a Vietnamese whore. He thought she loved him.

I looked up and saw
a Vietnamese woman pull the pin from a grenade and toss it into the club. To save the girl,
Ranklin fell on the grenade. It was a good death for an assassin. A little honor for a man who
had none.

I made my next
transport in time. Another chopper. On board, I fed the eagle another chunk of raw meat.
Ungrateful, the eagle expressed a preference for my fingers as I tried to thrust the meat through
the bars of the cage.

The eagle and I are
not friends. My totem and my vision ally is a lizard, the Ancient of Reptiles, the eagle's enemy.
Perhaps the eagle senses this and regards me as its enemy, perhaps I am simply contaminated with
too much contact with men.

The unrelenting
heat seemed to strike against us as the chop­per sped toward my next jumping-off
place.

The chopper pilot
noticed my discomfort. "Welcome to Sauna City," he said, waving his thumb to the left toward Da
Nang as we passed near it. "At noon, you can fry rice in your helmet while you're wearing
it."

"Any advice for a
new recruit?" I asked. The chopper pilot looked at my dark skin, dark eyes, and slightly built
body in the uniform at least a size too big for me.

"You'll pardon me
saying so," he said in a lazy Texas drawl, "but you ain't exactly sporting a military look with
the hair there, sport. Now I see lots of long hair, after you've parked here for a while, but
you're the first greenie to arrive with it. You must be an Indian or a Mexican."

"I could plead
guilty to one of those," I said, looking back to see how the eagle was taking to the chopper
ride. He seemed fairly quiet. I found that strapping his cage near an open door seemed to make
him content. The air rushing in must have made him think he was flying. "So what?"

"If I were you,
Tonto or Pronto or whichever you are, I'd practice looking as white as possible. Over here the
weirdness swallows you. It's best to look like just one side, not two."

We had arrived at
our destination. I meant to ask him what he meant by that statement but he got busy landing us,
so I let it ride. He hunched forward over the controls as he brought the
chopper in. I saw the spot on his back where the flak would
catch him and tear his insides out.

I jumped out the
door of the chopper as soon as we touched down.

"Eagle for eating
or do you ride it around?" said the pilot as he began handing down the cage to me.

"This not eagle,
white boy, this is Texas chicken," I said with a grin.

The pilot touched
the door frame of the chopper. "Hell, boy, you just rode in a Texas chicken! That scrawny thing .
. ." The eagle got him by the hand and bit down hard. "Christ! He cut me to the bone!" moaned the
pilot, holding his bloody hand. "Good luck, Chief, and thanks for the Purple Heart!"

"First blood," I
said under my breath to the eagle with a smile on my face and turned to look around at my
surroundings. Behind me, the chopper lifted off, driving the eagle in the cage wild
again.

I was on the
helipad at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, temporarily assigned as a door gunner to the 145th. At least,
that was the paperwork designation that hid my real mission there.

I heard a
high-pitched whine and turned to see an F-100 taxi by on an adjacent runway. I wondered what the
hell the chopper pilot had meant by what he had said. The weirdness swallows you? How does one
look like one side and not two? I hadn't spoken it aloud, just thought it, but a voice answered,
"He meant you look too Vietnamese." This came from a pilot sitting in the cockpit of a
blunt-nosed Super Sabre. "And you can bet your brown rear end, that's no real asset here. Sure as
hell, some trigger-happy cowboy is going to nail your ass thinking you're a VC infiltrator in a
good-guy suit. Maybe you ought to curl your hair. Maybe they'll think you're a Jew with a severe
tan." The pilot laughed. "Christ, I'm getting almost too funny to live!"