If you’re a new visitor and have a few minutes to spare, you can read the background posts here, here, here, here, and here. If you don’t, well, just lean back and enjoy the ride…
The Time: 0640 the morning of Colonel Trinh Vo Thanh’s meeting.
The Place: Dempsey Compound Gate, Can Tho Army Airfield, Phong Dinh Province, RVN.
Sergeant Van Lanh Thu waited while the gate guards performed their normal pat-down search of his trousers and the threadbare American fishing vest he always wore when he reported for work on the American base. Searching the vest always resulted in the guards finding and examining his cigarettes, his battered Zippo lighter and his lunch. The aroma from this last item dissuaded the guards from a further search of his person, which today might have revealed the 8mm film casette for the Minox camera he would shortly retrieve from its hiding place inside a rat-box.
Sergeant Van’s “day job” was stocking every narrow, meter-long, yellow box on the base with rat poison and removing the carcasses of the victims. It was, he thought, the perfect job for intelligence-gathering; everyone saw him and no one took notice of him. He could go anywhere because the yellow boxes with the red “Nguy Hiem” warning were everywhere…
Van knew where the tree-killing unit lived and began walking along the row of helicopters toward the ones with the blue and white insignia on the nose. They killed more than trees last night, he thought, glancing at the expended brass casings littering the revetments. Watch yourself, old uncle, or they’ll get you, too. Van knew that if he patrolled the area, eventually he would see one of the pilots with the metal insignia that many of them wore, and he would be very happy if the first pilot he saw was one of them. The Minox was metal, the sun was climbing, and if he was careless with the way he removed it from its pocket inside his vest, sunglint would betray him. Van squatted on his heels by a rat-box and pretended to examine it while he scanned the line of helicopters in their revetments.
Movement by the far revetment. Brown-green uniform, carrying torso armor with one hand and a helmet bag in the other.
Pilot, carrying weapon, water and little else. He fights light, as is proper, he thought with professional approval. Van saw a flash of metal on the right shirt pocket. Excellent. He’s from the tree-killer unit. He withdrew the Minox, using the rat-box to mask his movements. He’d wait until the pilot’s eyes were averted…
? I know that one!
As I walked toward my Huey-du-jour (I didn’t rate my own personal ship yet because we we didn’t have that many to go around anymore), I saw Rat-Catcher Six fiddling with one of the Nguy Hiem boxes and wondered (again) what garbage dump he’d scrounged his fishing vest from. I gave him a grin and a nod of recognition and went back to scanning tail numbers to find mine…
Van smiled politely in return and took the pilot’s picture as he turned his head and looked past him.
Van shrugged and baited the rat-box, then washed the poison from his hands in the pond behind the revetments. Later, he watched as the helicopter hovered past, crossed the runway and landed by the barrels of the tree-killing chemical. The pilot he’d recognized was at the controls.
At noon, he sought the shade of the north wall of the building where his cousin worked as the personal secretary of one of the American staff officers. He squatted on his heels, removed the plantain-leaf wrapper that contained his lunch with his left hand and leaned back until his shoulders touched the wall. He picked up the small wad of paper at his feet with his right hand.
He read the note from his cousin. “Sister Phoenix has sung and the fire casts a wider light.” Sister Phoenix was the Political Officer from the North who had been taken prisoner a fortnight previously when the Americans had surprised the Tay Do sub-unit commanders at their briefing. She had been reading the unit rosters provided by the commanders when the American helicopters appeared and, they had all hoped, she’d had the good sense to shove the rosters into the mud before she had been taken. The fire casts a wider light, he thought. It’s time to leave before the fire gets closer and fries my butt. The name of Van Lanh Thu was on one of those rosters, along with the name which appeared on his civilian-hire identity card.
Thirty minutes later, Van was walking briskly along QL4 towards the grove where Tay Do battalion’s sole remaining radio was concealed. In one of his inside vest pockets was a Minox film casette with a single exposure…
To be concluded...
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