Badger Games (6 page)

Boz closed the case and made sure the latches were secure. He stood up. “Right,” he said. “But the question is, How do I get it out of here? I can't carry all this myself.”

“That's your problem,” Franko said. “If it was me, I'd say leave it here and come back for it. In the meantime, the girl and I will hike out over the mountain.”

“Are you kiddin'?” Boz objected. “What about all these people? I'm sure I'm gonna leave this stash in here with them. Forget it. Besides, somebody's got to go down there and see what's happenin', and I'm not leavin' this stuff here where you and the broad and her cousins can haul it off. There's gotta be a couple hundred grand's worth in each one!”

“Not that much,” Franko said. But he could see Boz's point, all right. Boz was still holding his Glock in his hand, though not pointed at anyone. The man's concern was understandable. He looked at Fedima. She was soaked and bedraggled, obviously in a state of great emotional stress, although he sensed that she had considerable physical reserves left.

Himself, he felt exhausted—physically, mentally, and emotionally. This morning seemed years ago. How could so much happen
in a day? He felt that he had been asleep, enchanted, for the past year or so, then suddenly and rudely awakened by shouts—“Do something! Save yourself, save these people!”

He wanted to lie down and close his eyes and make it all stop. Instead, he asked Boz, “What do you suggest?”

Boz was getting angry. “I think you better come up with something before I just waste this whole batch of
balijas
and make you and the broad pack my goods out like a couple a fuckin' donkeys. Get it?” He hefted the Glock.

“You're forgetting that there's twenty or thirty KLA down there, including this girl's father and her brothers,” Franko said calmly. Bazok's anger had the odd effect of making him feel calm, in fact. “They're between you and whatever Serb outfit is driving up the road. That outfit's going to be up to its ass in bullets and blood before they get here. If they get here.”

“They'll get here,” Boz said. “They got tanks, cannon on halftracks, rockets, all kinds of shit. They'll have their hands full for half an hour, maybe, but they'll blow these peckerwoods away.”

“But then what?” Franko said. “Will they find you sitting here with a bunch of refugees and twenty kilos of pure heroin?”

“Twenty kilos?” Boz's eyes bugged out. He began to calculate mentally, but soon stopped. “What do you think?” he asked.

“There's other caves,” Franko said, “but …” He sighed and nodded toward Fedima, who was ministering to some of the children. “Obviously, there are no secret ones.”

Franko saw there was no way to get Boz to leave, not by himself, anyway. If there had been only one or two suitcases of heroin … what a stupid mistake. Was there any chance that the KLA could take the Serbs, or even hold them for a while? He had no idea what kind of armament the KLA fighters had, probably some shoulder-mounted rockets, some AK-47s. What he needed to do, he knew, was take Fedima and hike out over the hills, probably
before the KLA started to retreat, those that were left. He had studied the maps and had a pretty good idea of the task that would be. He'd prepared a couple of backpacks for them, containing water, food, money; he'd stashed them near the entrance to the cave.

“I'll go down and check on the situation at the farm,” he suggested to Boz. “You can wait here. Who knows? Maybe the army will chase the KLA in some other direction. There'll be a vehicle you can probably use to get back to town, with your goods.”

“Now you're talkin',” Boz said. “In the meantime, I'll hang on to the chick, so I know you're comin' back.”

“I'll be back,” Franko said. “Don't do anything stupid.” He said good-bye to Fedima and told her to be patient. They would get away.

“Will I go with you?” she asked. They had walked into the passageway. They embraced and kissed. Her tears were wet on his cheeks.

“Oh yes,” he assured her. “We'll go to Montana.”

“Montana,” she said. He had told her about Montana.

Then he left. The wind had dropped considerably, but it was still gusting, with periodic bursts of buffeting gales. And the rain had moderated, but still fell steadily. He hiked back to the farm quite rapidly, taking not more than fifteen minutes. There was no one about, to his surprise. No lights, no voices. Nonetheless, he skirted the compound and crossed the road above where Boz's jeep still smoked, a charred ruin at the side of the stone wall. He was used to walking on steep hillsides. It was not a great problem for him, despite the weather. He scrambled around the hill to a place where he could get a view of the road as it wound below. He saw nothing, so he continued to make his way down the mountainside, and eventually he got to a position where he could see something. Thanks to his position on the hillside, the presence of good cover, and the rain, he was able to get within a couple of hundred feet. A very steep
hillside, practically a cliff, fell at least a hundred feet below him to the road.

The battle, if there had been a battle, was over. There were groups of uniformed troups dispersed here and there, in watchful, wary positions, but the main business concerned a cluster of men in civilian clothes. They were standing in the road, hands on their heads. There may have been more, shielded from his view by the cliff's precipitousness. These, Franko felt sure, were the KLA, or what remained of them. They had been captured. There were eighteen men that he could see. What had happened to the others was in no way apparent. There were no bodies lying about.

He saw that one of the men in the cluster was the old farmer, Daliljaj. He stood still, neither defiant nor defeated in his demeanor. Franko couldn't be sure, but he thought that two of Daliljaj's sons were also there.

A Serbian officer spoke to what looked like a couple of sergeants off to one side. The NCOs signaled down the road and shouted for trucks. Then they all turned, along with a squad of soldiers, and forced the civilians to the side of the road, under the brow of the hill and hidden from Franko's view. The soldiers suddenly opened fire, blazing away at the hill. There were screams, but Franko did not try to get closer, to witness the slaughter. The minute the guns began to sputter he turned and raced back the way he had come.

He ran as hard but as warily as he could, for fear that he might encounter some escaped KLA men, who would, naturally, be eager for revenge. But he encountered no one. He was panting and scarcely able to speak when he found the hidden entrance of the cave, but as soon as he was inside and had crept nearly to the chamber he stopped.

Something was wrong. With great effort he managed to suppress his panting, to lie quietly until he could breathe with some control. There should have been a light, some little sound. But it
was utterly dark. He went forward on his hands and knees. There was a very bad smell. It was not just the odor of feces and urine, but perhaps of blood, of burnt hair, it might be. And then, of course, the acrid scent of gunfire.

He put his hand in something wet. Something very wet, but sticky, as well.

“
W
e ran north every night,” the colonel said. He was reminiscing. Joe didn't know where all this was heading, but he listened and didn't say anything. He'd heard the colonel's war stories before.

They were sitting on the deck of a restaurant that looked out on Lake St. Clair, sipping drinks after dinner. The colonel was drinking straight whiskey in a glass; Joe was nursing a bottle of Stroh's beer. The other members of the party had withdrawn after dinner. It was warm, still summer. There were a lot of boats in this marina, their masts like so many leafless trees. Joe supposed that the moon on the lake had evoked this nostalgic mood, but he was sure that there was some deeper point to it. The colonel liked to talk about his days in Vietnam, Joe knew, but there was always a point.

There were still a few pleasure boats on the lake, their running lights twinkling, people partying. Occasionally a powerboat would come roaring up from the lake, then throttle down and motor slowly into the dock at the restaurant, and young people would hop out, laughing. Joe had a boat, a Sea Ray that was moored in its slip a few hundred yards away, among the masts.

“I loved the moon on the tops of the clouds,” the colonel said, nodding toward the lake. “There were almost always clouds. But once in a while you could see the forest, the jungle. No lights down there, though. Except for the cockpit lights, the moon and the stars were the only lights you'd see. Nothing but night below you, blacker than Hades, except for a river, maybe, gleaming in the moonlight.

“I had a little tape player. I'd slip the earplug device inside my helmet. I had to do it. My backseater liked rock. The first time we went up he played some Rolling Stones crap, something like that. Drove me nuts—I had to make him turn it off. The next day I got my own tape machine and earplugs for both of us, so I could listen to Bach and he could hear his rock on his machine.”

“Bach?” Joe said.

“My favorite tape,” the colonel said, “was one I'd made off a French LP—
The Cello Suites,
played by Fournier. Or for a change sometimes, I'd play another tape, one by Glenn Gould, of the
Well-Tempered Clavier.
” He was silent for a long moment, staring out at the lake. People at the other tables around them laughed and called to one another. The colonel did not hear them. He was listening to something else.

“There's nothing like it,” he said. “Riding that Thud up Route Pack Six, listening to the cello with the moon on the tops of the clouds. I love those suites, especially the preludes … this statement of theme, then the elaboration, the argument. A solo cello can sound like many voices, at times … babbling, conversing with itself … then the solitary voice, winding and sonorous. The piano pieces are different, of course—fugues. But I prefer the suites. Have you ever listened to them?”

Joe said that he regretted that he hadn't.

“After the prelude,” the colonel said, “come these stately or lively dance figures. It's very civilized music, formal but it has an implacable drive. It was amazing to listen to them while you were
flying up to Hanoi, to bomb. Nobody's talking in the strike force, just this rushing background sound of the engines, the breathing noise of the oxygen, the occasional remark from the backseater, noting a turning point, pointing out a site we'd bombed a couple of days earlier.

“The tape would stop just about the time things got interesting. Just about the time the backseater said, ‘I've got five rings, probably a SAM.' That meant you were being tracked by enemy radar. Then you'd have to run down Thud Ridge into Hanoi. Everything blazing away at you. Two minutes of pure hell, the Cong screaming on the radio, dodging SAMs, Fire Cans, Fan Songs—those were kinds of anti-aircraft guns. Guys in the strike force yelling out on the radio. Then the MiGs as you came out, down the river, running for your life. Plenty of light then, lots of explosions, aircraft on fire—guys yelling again: ‘I'm hit! I'm on fire!' Then the dark again, as you climbed out. And I'd start the tape. I'd be almost calm by the time I got back to Korat.”

“What about your backseater?” Joe asked. “Was he calm?”

“Him? No. He was wired. He was jumping around, eager to go again. But,” he said, “one day he didn't come back.”

“What happened?”

The colonel drank off his whiskey. “Come on,” he said. He picked up the bill, and Joe followed him out. The colonel paid in cash, tossing in a huge tip. They walked along the concrete abutment toward the wooden catwalks that would take them through the maze of boats to where Joe's Sea Ray was moored. The colonel took out a cigar, but he didn't light it. There were too many signs forbidding smoking about. But once they reached the boat and went aboard, he clipped the cigar and lit it. They sat in the tall cockpit seats beneath the canopy. It was dark here. The bluish lights on tall poles, and those that reflected from nearby boats where others were relaxing aboard, didn't really illuminate the cockpit where Joe and the colonel sat.

“That kid,” the colonel said, “my first backseater, he went down with the plane.”

“No shit,” Joe said. “You were shot down?” Joe recalled another version of this story, from when he'd first met the colonel. In that version, the colonel had spent some time in a Vietnamese prison.

“Yeah. It wasn't like you see in the movies, the newsreels. We weren't in B-52s, six miles above the war. We were in the Thuds, F-105s. We rolled in on target, diving down to a thousand feet or so, then pickling the bombs and hauling ass down river. Going downtown, we called it. Did it every day. Anyway, what the news-reels don't show is that Hanoi was the most heavily defended target in aerial war history. In the news shots you see these big 52s, way up there in a silent, empty sky, releasing thousands of bombs like dropping handfuls of pretzel sticks, then turning away and flying safely home to Guam. It wasn't like that, at all.”

“It wasn't?” Joe said, more or less on cue.

“That was down south,” the colonel said. “They were up around thirty thousand. They could release bombs from the DMZ. No MiGs, no SAMs south of the DMZ, see? The real war was ‘going downtown' every day. Besides all the missiles, the guns, they had every kid in Vietnam who could carry a rifle lying on the tops of buildings, or in the parks, firing up at us.”

“With rifles?” Joe laughed.

“You don't think a .30-caliber rifle bullet can bring down an F-105?” the colonel said. “Well, they can't, or not often. They don't hit anything. But once in a while you'd get a hit. It's a sharp rap, like a stone hitting the windshield of your car on a dirt road. Only those bullets penetrated the skin of that plane. It might do no harm; usually it didn't. But it could tear up the wiring, puncture a fuel line, a hydraulic line. Everything's there for a purpose, Joe. You need it all. Usually, nothing happened. You'd get back to Korat and look
at the plane, find the bullet hole. Usually in the wing. You might have leaked some fluid, maybe some fuel. The guys would have to go in there and check it out.