Aces (56 page)

The picture dissolved to an indoor scene: a rugged-looking American in military uniform was seated at a table beside a Chinese
woman and man in civilian clothes. All three were smiling into the camera.

The camera zoomed in for a close-up of the Chinese couple.
Meet Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, rulers of China. They’ve appealed to FDR for American air power to keep the
Burma Road open, so that China can keep fighting the Japs
.

Next came a close-up of the American in uniform.
And here’s the man FDR has sent to do the job. He’s Captain Claire Lee Chennault, recently of the United States Army Air Corps,
and now in China per FDR’s mandate. Chennault’s leading a special fighter-pilot volunteer group of broad-shouldered American
boys. This American Volunteer Group vows to wrest control of the China sky from the Japs, before Tojo can do to the Burma
Road what he’s done to Pearl Harbor!

The screen flickered with footage of an airdrome staked out in a jungle clearing. There were a number of P-40s parked beneath
the trees. Some of the fighters were draped under camouflage netting, and some looked ready to fly, but all had their engine
cowlings festooned with those fierce-looking shark-snout paint jobs. In the background were thatch-roofed huts, fuel-barrel
stockpiles, and men hurrying about in baggy, khaki shorts and leather flying jackets.

From bases like these hidden away on high jungle plateaus
—

The scene shifted to show a number of men bending over the hood of a Jeep, studying maps.

—
Chennault and the boys of the A.V.G. are ready to give Tojo’s gnat swarm a shellacking they won’t ever forget!

There was another scene of two P-40s in flight, performing loops against the clouds…

Isn’t that right, fellows?

The sky scene faded into a close-up of a half-dozen of the volunteer pilots in their khaki and leather garb, wearing pistols
around their waists, or in shoulder rigs. They were laughing and joking with one another as they looked shyly into the camera,
and then put their arms upon each other’s shoulders to improvise a ragged, kicking, conga line. The line broke apart as the
young men grinned and waved into the cameras one last time.

No wonder the Chinese call them “Fei Hu
”— the narrator said jovially, as the background music began to soar.

Gold was staring at the screen. There was something about the pilot second from the left… Something familiar, even if his
light hair was close-cropped, and despite his hollow-looking face, and the dark shadows under his eyes…

“Oh my God, is that Steven?…” Gold murmured to himself.

Fei Hu, in Chinese, that means Flying Tigers!

“That’s Steven!” Gold bellowed, jumping up from his seat in the darkened movie house.

“Hey, buddy!” somebody behind Gold yelled. “Down in front!”

Gold ignored him. He pointed at the screen, as Steven, thirty feet tall, waved back at him. “That’s my son!”

Steven Gold was awakened by a distant rooster, crowing to greet the dawn. The room was bathed in silvery half-light. He stared
up, sleepy-eyed, through the cloud of gauzy mosquito netting enveloping the double bed. The slowly revolving ceiling fan was
gently wafting the currents of incense-scented air, barely stirring the brightly colored Chinese tapestries hung from brass
stretchers on the walls.

Christmas day, he thought to himself, stretching beneath the satin coverlet. Beside him, Monique stirred. Steven kicked off
the coverlet. Monique was lying on her belly. Her feet were beside his head on the pillows. Her magnificently rounded ass,
the color of toffee, was within easy reach. He patted it, and then reached between her legs to tickle where she was shaved
as smooth as a baby’s bottom. She made a sleepy squeak of complaint, but pressed her strong thighs together to lock his fingers
inside her.

“Merry Christmas,” he told her.

She released his hand, curling around to take hold of his penis as Steven lightly stroked her long, sculpted back. Monique
had straight black hair, shiny as patent leather. Her eyes were black as well, and shaped like almonds. A slight smile began
to play at the corners of her pink rosebud mouth as she began tickling his balls with her long, crimson-enameled fingernails.
Then she began to suck him. Steven lay back and watched the ceiling fan go round and round.

Madame Marie’s was a four-story building located in the anthill-like labyrinth of alleyways behind Rangoon’s terribly British,
terribly proper, Silver Grill. The girls at Marie’s came in three basic flavors: kimono girls, girls spiced with leather,
or girls swathed in lace. The kimono girls were okay, with their intricate hairdos, and geisha giggling, but Steven preferred
the lace girls, with their black-satin garter belts and peek-a-boo bras, and their silk stockings with the seams up the back.
Steven didn’t at all understand the appeal of the leather girls, but Sam “Cappy” Fitzpatrick had once explained to him that
they were an acquired taste, like scotch malt whiskey. Cappy was an ex-Army Air Corps aviator, and Steven’s fighter squadron
leader, so Arnie looked up to him. And Cappy had sure been right about the scotch.

Monique was a lace girl. Just now her garter belt and bra were missing in action, but her stockings were still in the battle;
one flying high up on her slender thigh, the other bunched around her ankle. Her black lace panties had seen a lot of dogfighting
during last night’s tussles. Just now the sheer, lacy material was bunched in the crack of her ass, and no wonder. Monique
was just average in the chest department, but her rear end cleavage was positively inspirational.

Steven had been spending his nights with Monique for a couple of weeks, ever since Chennault had assigned the squadron to
Rangoon. He was fond of Monique, and liked to think that she cared for him. Not that he was born yesterday. Hell, he was young,
but not so young that he didn’t know better than to fall in love with a whore. After all, every morning that he left Madame
Marie’s, a guy was waiting at the door to collect the rent…

Nah, it wasn’t love. Steven just looked forward to seeing her. Every night he’d bring her chocolates, cigarettes, and whatever
else he could swipe from base camp that he thought she might like. Each night she’d be waiting for him, eager to give the
gift of herself. She didn’t have much English, but she managed to tell him stories about growing up in her village, where
there were rice paddies, and forests full of gaudy parrots and chattering monkeys. Madame Marie had recruited Monique when
she was just eleven, during a trip to French Indochina—a place called Viet Nam.

Monique wasn’t her real name of course, but Madame Marie gave all her girls French names. Monique had claimed that she didn’t
remember what her real name had been. He accepted that. Madame Marie’s pleasure rooms were designed for such sweet little
lies.

Monique was still busy inhaling him, but he didn’t think he had much left to give her from last night. Anyway, the sun was
full up, even if he wasn’t.

“You leave so soon?” she pouted as he eased himself free of her multiple delicious embraces.

“My heart’s just not in it this mornin’, li’l darl’n,” Steven said, emulating the lazy drawl of the veteran pilots in his
squadron.

“You no bloody like me no more?” Monique demanded, sitting up in bed.

Steven had to smile. Rangoon
was
a British post. “I like you fine, honey,” he said. “But we got a feeling over at the base that it might start raining Japs
today.”

A few days ago the Japanese had made their first bombing assault against Rangoon. The squad had gone up to meet them, and
the ensuing dogfight had painted fire and smoke and blood across the sky above the city’s timeless pagodas. When it was over,
Rangoon’s waterfront was ablaze from Jap bombs, but sixteen of their planes had been downed, as had four of the squadron’s
P-40s. One of the squad’s pilots had been killed, but the other three were okay, despite the Japs’ attempts to strafe them
while they were helplessly suspended beneath their parachutes.

Steven grabbed his baggy khaki trousers off the floor and shook them out before stepping into them. Scorpions and centipedes
were uncommon above the ground floor in city buildings, but Arnie had gotten into the habit of checking his duds since last
summer at Toungoo training camp, where there’d been all types of creepy-crawlies. He checked his ankle-high, rubber-soled
work shoes and laced them on. He retrieved and donned his sleeveless gray sweatshirt, then shook out his New York Yankees
baseball cap before putting it on his head.

He felt himself lucky to have been assigned to Rangoon, away from Chennault, who was pretty much a stickler for rules and
regs. If the old man had been around, there was no way that Steven would have been out of uniform, never mind spending his
nights with Monique. But Chennault was at the A.V.G. headquarters camp, in Kunming, China, and that was almost seven hundred
miles away, at the opposite end of the Burma Road. Cappy Fitzpatrick, Steven’s base camp commander, didn’t give a flying fuck
about rules and regs, as long as a guy had his shit together up in the air, where it counted.

“You kill lots of Japs for Monique today, okay, honey?” Monique smiled.

“I sure hope so.” Steven muttered, more to himself than to her. He gave her a kiss for good luck as he reached past her to
unwrap his holstered Colt .45 from the teak bedpost. He shrugged into the shoulder rig, fastening its strap across his chest.

That dogfight a couple of days ago had been the squad’s first taste of combat, and Steven had been a part of it for only a
short while. He’d managed to lock on to the tail of a Jap Ki-27 fighter, and let loose a burst, but his guns had jammed before
he’d done much, if any, damage. Defenseless, he’d had to drop out of the fight and return to base. It had been a frustrating
and worrisome experience. Cappy had said that every guy has reason to doubt himself before he’s experienced combat; that no
one could know for sure how brave he was until he’d experienced his baptism by fire… Steven wanted to get his personal baptism
over and done with, so that he could begin enjoying himself.

He had another worry that nagged at him constantly. He hadn’t yet stopped kicking himself in the ass for letting himself be
filmed by that newsreel crew a couple of months back. He’d been drunk at the time, but that was no excuse for such stupidity.
Here he’d gone to all this trouble to create a new identity for himself, and now his mug was being flashed on movie screens
all over America. He could only hope that anyone back home who knew him would not see the damned thing and alert his parents.

He shook out his leather jacket and slung it over his shoulder. The sun had just come up, but already the temperature felt
close to ninety.

On the jacket’s back was sewn a large silk patch emblazoned with the Chinese flag, and a message in Chinese characters identifying
him as an ally aviator fighting on behalf of China. Somebody had come up with the patches after one of the guys had suffered
a close-call crash landing. The poor guy had been in trouble for a while, trying to convince some hostile Chinese peasants
that he wasn’t some new kind of Jap.

He kissed Monique good-bye a final time, and then tramped downstairs. A couple of the other guys from the squad who were shacking
up here were waiting for him in the front lobby. One of them had the distributor cap to their Jeep; taking the cap with you
when you parked was the surest way of making sure the vehicle would be there when you returned.

Steven cheerfully paid the doorman ten bucks on the way out. By Steven’s way of thinking, ten bucks a night was cheap as hell
just to get to sleep in a soft bed with clean sheets, and with indoor plumbing just a short walk down the hall. Monique was
the icing on the cake.

Outside in the alleyway, away from the bordello’s perfumed air, the stench hit him like a slap in the face. Back to reality,
Steven thought as he and the others piled into the Jeep and rolled out of the alleyway.

Rangoon was a British bastion. From what he had learned so far, he guessed that meant that it was a good place for foreigners
to do business. But the places of light and pleasure, like the Silver Grill, or Madame Marie’s, were few. Mostly, Rangoon
was a dark and crowded place, teeming with filth. The acrid stink of excrement and unwashed bodies mixed with the diesel fumes
and the bluish haze of thousands of charcoal cookfires to hang like a mist in the stagnant air.

They drove through a food market, already open for business and busy, even at this hour. The produce venders had their boxes
out on display; fruits and vegetables with warts and hairs, colored so impossibly scarlet or green that they made you shudder.
There were the fishmongers with their piles of glistening gun-metal-gray squid, and baskets of writhing eels. The butchers
were open. Some of them were hacking portions off their rusty slabs and glistening limbs of beef and pork, hanging from hastily
erected bamboo scaffoldings. The meat shimmered with flies that rose and fell with each swipe of the cleaver. Another kind
of butcher sold things that were alive in cages: white ducks with orange beaks and feet; trembling rabbits; crying puppies.

Steven and the others kept their hands on their automatics as the driver slowly made his way through the crowded market street,
honking his horn to cut a path for the Jeep. They didn’t let down their guard until they were on the relatively open road
at the outskirts of the city. They hated themselves for their fear and suspicion, but they all felt it, just the same. It
was just too strange here in Rangoon. The poverty and misery were too overwhelming. The only possible response, firsthand,
was fear and loathing.

He thought about his father, who donated so much money to charity. Steven had never really understood what that meant, until
he’d come here. Nothing, not even his travels across America, during which he’d seen some pretty bad things, could have prepared
him for Rangoon. If what his father contributed to charity helped even a little bit in places like this, well, then his father
was doing something important. He hoped he would remember to tell Pop that, next time he saw him…