THE FOURTH WATCH (32 page)

“Mike!”

It said, 'A new love is beginning in your
life'.

She didn't say anything and averted her eyes,
sipping her tea. I said, "You think they rig these
things?"

She burst out laughing, breaking the tension.
"Yep."

"I think so."

I had to fight Carolyn to let me pay the check,
but she finally relented. I left an obscene tip that was not lost
on our server who bowed and scraped us all the way out the
door.

Outside the night was cool, the moon a hazy
slit in the sky. Carolyn's face was flush from her laughter and her
mouth and eyes still held the remnants of it. The dark sky was low
and braided with shadowy clouds. Carolyn stood on her toes and
kissed me. "You're okay, Mike," she almost whispered and put her
head on my shoulder.

''Gee, thanks pal. You're pretty boss
yourself."

She pulled away from me. ''Boss! I'm pretty
boss?"

"Sure," I told her smiling. ''Being out on the
town with a young chick, you have to work the lingo."

Down the street a car started its engine. The
lights came on and it started up the hill.

''I'm all goose flesh. What else have you been
working on?”

"I did one chin up in a row this
morning."

"And what, now you're gonna tell me you need
your rest?' She looked at her watch; "it is almost 9:30!" She said
it playfully, but her eyes caught mine and moved back and forth,
searching.

''No,'' I said. "It occurred to me that when
you were at the house the other night, I never did get around to
showing you the upstairs."

"Oh," she said, and even in the shadows I could
see her blushing, "and there's something up their I'd be interested
in seeing."

"Sure. I've got a terrific model train
collection, I can watch them go around for hours."

She laughed and took my arm. "Well, lets check
it out then!"

We stepped off the curb to cross the street to
the parking lot. The car that was coming up the hill slowed and
stopped so we could cross. I held my hand up in thanks to the
driver, who was just a silhouette behind the windshield. His face
broke in a smile and I could see his eyes and teeth. We crossed in
front and kept going. There was something odd about him. Carolyn
was chattering something. I turned and looked back over my shoulder
in time to see the driverside window slide down, and the blue-black
barrel of a gun extend out of it ... and suddenly everything was in
slow motion, like in the landscape of a dream.

I turned back to Carolyn and yelled for her to
get down. I saw the smile in her eye's change to a question mark,
and then to fear. I saw the muzzle flashes before I heard the
reports, and before I could turn my body in front of hers. I felt
an ice cold shaft enter my back and turn white hot in my guts. At
the same moment I looked up and saw a black hole open in Carolyn's
forehead and then a tear open in her neck. Another bullet hit me
high on my right side and spun me around and I fell backward and
felt my head crack on the street curb. I looked up and saw
taillights disappearing over the top of the hill. Across the street
people were coming out of the Wok and pointing in my direction. My
eyes were losing focus. I looked to my right and I saw Carolyn
lying on her side, her eyes open and staring vacantly past me.
There was blood on her face, and blood was pumping from her neck,
matting her hair and pooling on the ground in front of her. I
reached out my hand and pressed against the torn flesh of her
throat. I could feel her warm lifeblood pumping away through my
fingers. "Carolyn," I whispered.

Then everything went black

PART TWO

THEN AND AGAIN

21

Laos, 1970

CORPORAL SALVATORE MOLTINALDO
slipped and scrambled his way up a muddy,
root-veined trail near the top of the rain forest, on the way to
Xam Sing. It was slow going. One of a million squalls that seemed
to pepper the rain forests each hour had pounded its way through
the jungle, and in its aftermath, rain water leaked out of the
bamboo, palm, and banana trees that formed a canopy above the
trail

This was a dangerous time to be on the trail.
The rainwater made the tree branches slick with wet moss and sap
oil and the bamboo vipers could lose their purchase and fall on you
out of the leaves. Or the one-two snakes, little green and brown
serpents whose bite was almost always quickly fatal. That's why the
Americans called them "one-twos". They bit you, you took two steps,
and you were dead.

But Corporal Moltinaldo had made this trip many
times before, and it was a most profitable journey. Behind him two
Hmong villagers - who fancied themselves 'Freedom Fighters' loosely
allied with Prince Souphanouvong, but who were in reality rice
farmers from a village on the river - wandered along in coolie
garb. They wore big straw conical hats on their heads and gray
'pajamas' made up of a coarse shirt that buttoned down the front
and loose, drawstring pants that stopped just below their knees. On
their feet they wore only sandals, but Sal Moltinaldo had seen them
both flick snakes off the path with their toes without a care. Each
carried a rifle, an old bolt action, wood stalked, blue barreled
barbell of a weapon, of the variety used by the French when they
re-colonized Indochina after World War II. They were certainly pre
the M-l and Kalishnakov weapons presently in play across the river
in Vietnam and, as near as Sal could tell, just barely post Davey
Crockett's squirrel gun. But he knew each one of them could shoot a
fly off the ass of an ox at fifty paces, which is why he had hired
them on. They chatted away in a mangle of Min, Cantonese, French
and pidgin English that he knew he would never understand, but he
also knew that their ears were tuned to these jungles, and that
they would sense danger long before he did.

After another forty-five minutes of climbing
they broke out above the jungle onto the ragged hills where shear
limestone buttes soared up out of the mist. Teak and cedar trees
clustered and formed small forests in the swells of the hills, and
saw grass grew in patches along the slopes. In another half an
hour, up higher and drawing closer to Xam Sing, they stopped for a
rest in the brutal heat and looked back down at the jungle below.
The Ou River meandered along, and twisted in and out forming small
open deltas of flooded fields, before ducking back into the rain
forests. A sweltering shroud of mist covered the jungle and clogged
the trees. It was still late afternoon but the moon, wafer thin and
smudged in the thick air was up. There was a haunting beauty to it
all; the tangle of broad leaf trees, the mist boiling in the silt
green sky, but Sal Moltinaldo knew that the river banks were thick
with crocodiles and its trees hung with pythons. He knew that
panthers climbed up out of the jungle in the late day, and prowled
in the shadows of the teak forests looking for a meal grazing in
the saw grass. It all gave him the creeps, and a shiver went
through him even though he was soaked with sweat in the nearly 100
degree heat.

But he put all those thoughts behind him as
they again began to climb toward the hamlet of huts known as Xam
Sing. The man he was going to see was an opium farmer named Ka. Ka
was Sal's clandestine supplier of heroin and smoke opium.
Clandestine in the sense that Sal was supposedly principally
supplied with the drugs he sold to the thousands of American
'advisers' now in Laos through a network controlled by South
Vietnamese Generals. There was a strict chain of distribution that
allowed this cartel to profit from just about every high that
occurred in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, no matter what side you
were on. The cartel's pipelines reached back into Burma and
Thailand, and many believed they were controlled in some fashion
out of China. Entrepreneurship was ruthlessly discouraged, but the
lure of the enormous profits to be made sometimes obscured ones
view of the risks.

Sal had taken great advantage of his situation
'in county'. He was attached to a Special Forces unit that was
shipped to the area around Ban Donkon from Saigon in 1969. There
were thousands of Americans or American allied troops in Laos
already. They were shoring up the forces of Prince Souvanna Phouma,
who headed up the current Monarchy that was right leaning and
sympathetic to the South Vietnamese. Souvanna Phouma was in a
bloody struggle against the rag-tag forces of his half-brother,
Prince Souphanouvong, whose Pathet Lao revolutionary army was being
heavily supported by the North Vietnamese and Chinese. Laos was a
mess. You could never tell who was on what side. You had your two
Laotian factions. Then you had Vietnamese on both sides in the
equation, and the Chinese. Throw in the Americans and the Russians
and no one knew who was doing what, to who. There were mixed
alliances everywhere. It was tough to keep score.

The Americans and their allies were in Laos to
accomplish two main objectives - well three, if you counted the
more general 'stop the spread of communism' stuff. First they were
there to monitor and disrupt activity on the Ho Chi Minh trail,
which ran through eastern Laos and served as the primary supply
route to North Vietnamese forces fighting in the south. Second was
reconnaissance of North Vietnamese airforce personnel, who were
building airstrips and moving aircraft into Laos and using the
airstrips as base camps for raids all over the war zone. Thousands
of troops were involved, spread out across the country. Sal was a
logistics expert and his unit supplied the troops in the field with
food, fuel, ammunition, medical supplies, clothing and mortuary
services – and everything else that kept an army on the move. Sal
was also using this network to keep the troops in the field
supplied with dope.

It was an incredibly profitable enterprise. The
average dogface didn't have a clue what he was doing in this God
forsaken world of gooks, snakes and lizards; didn't know what all
the shooting and dying was for, and was fairly confident that not a
single person in the line of command did either. It was a war
running on its own momentum, interrupted by occasional peace talks
that always broke down. It was a war of vague concepts that held no
meaning in the blood thick mud of the strange battlefields. A war
wreaking havoc in the homes and neighborhoods and cities of
America, turning the people against their own government and its
armies. So in the dark, creepy-crawly jungle nights, under trees
rustling with enemy snipers and monkeys and leopards, soldiers
huddled in wormy foxholes and got zonked out on the local weed and
smack.

Sal was supplied through the
cartel. About a fourth of what he distributed came through
'sanctioned' channels. To do otherwise would have been foolish
because then not only would he face the wrath of that organization,
but he would lose its protection. Of course not
everyone
was involved. There were
straight-laced officers who hated what the drug trade was doing to
the troops. And there were plenty of soldiers who steered clear of
drugs altogether. But they knew what was going on, and they also
knew that, if they made too much noise, and got the cartel's
attention, they'd have a good chance of being shot on patrol. Sal
knew that if he didn't flaunt it, and made the right payments here
and there, he would be pretty much left alone to do his business.
So he wanted his protection, but he also wanted a piece of the
enormous profit that could come from buying direct from the
farmers.

And that's where he was going now, to take
delivery from farmer Ka. Ka had poppy fields all over this
province, and a lab in Burma where his plants were processed into
opium and heroin. And he was a reliable supplier.

*****

LESS THAN A KLICK
from Xam Sing the trail flattened out in the
shade of a soaring pine forest. Up ahead in the filtered sunlight
Sal could see something in the road. At first he thought it was a
log, and then as he got closer he thought maybe it was the carcass
of an animal. But it was neither. It was farmer Ka. He was staked
out in the dirt, naked, his manhood cut away and lying on his back.
The fire ants were at him, swarming in his crotch and marching in a
line across his chest to his mouth and ears - and eyes. His face
was contorted in a horrific scream that had already left him. The
lens of his left eye was tipped up and the ants were working the
sweet meat of his eye socket with their pincers. His fists were
clenched tight, white with bone breaking exertion.

Sal's reaction was immediate. He did not go
forward for a closer look, or to help, or check for a pulse. At the
same moment that his mind registered what his eyes were seeing, his
hips were swiveling and torso turning to run. But as he turned, his
mouth open to yell to the Hmong, he saw the blade of a bayonet come
through the chest of one of them and a machete bite into the neck
of the other. The Hmong on the right stood for a second, with a
look of astonishment on his face as he stared at the thing sticking
out through his chest, then slipped forward off the blade to the
ground. The other had his weapon on his shoulder when the machete
struck. It hit the barrel and flashed along the steel, slicing off
his fingers before chopping into the side of his neck, severing his
head nearly off his shoulders and sending up an enormous shower of
blood.