Dead and Kicking (12 page)

‘Safety pin,’ he said, ‘from a hand grenade.’

VT nodded. ‘We Vietnamese became very adept at improvising weapons and making booby-traps. It comes from a long history of fighting off powerful foreign invaders using very limited resources.’

Jack nodded. ‘An old favourite was securing the spring-loaded handle of a grenade with duct tape or a heavy elastic band and then pulling the pin and dropping the grenade into a fuel tank. The grenade is armed, but the tape keeps it safe.’

‘Until the fuel eats through the elastic or dissolves the adhesive on the tape and releases the handle,’ VT said. ‘The fuse is activated and four or five seconds later …’

Jack smiled. ‘
KA-BOOM!
’

‘At which time,’ Cartwright said, ‘if they’ve used the right amount of tape or a thick enough elastic band, I’m guessing you blokes are at 1500 feet over some piece of trackless jungle?’

‘That’s the drill,’ Jack said, ‘and an explosion or fire in a helicopter at 1500 feet isn’t something you want to deal with ’cos there ain’t no bloody place to go. Some chopper pilots in ’Nam made pacts with their co-pilots that in the event of a hit and high-altitude fire, whoever was still functioning would shoot the other person and then themselves.’

Nobody said anything. There really wasn’t anything to say.

‘Anyway,’ Jack continued, ‘this type of booby-trap is very hard to time accurately, so we assumed someone gave a signal by telephone or radio to drop the grenade into the tank just as we approached the airfield. It was the displaced fuel overflowing that tipped off VT. Saved by Archimedes’ principle you could say.’

‘So what did you do?’ I asked.

‘Well, there were a bunch of goons hanging around trying to look like mechanics, so we reckoned they had a Plan B if we twigged to Plan A, and Plan B had to be just as nasty. So we took a punt on having a safety window of at least ten minutes and took off, keeping low. I figured it would be better to put her down in a hard-to-access area, so we’d get a good head start on someone looking for bodies to confirm the kill. I don’t think either of us took a breath until we were on the ground.’

‘From what I saw on the TV it didn’t look like you could land a chopper in the middle of all that jungle.’

‘VT’s the man,’ Jack said. ‘He picked a grove of bamboo and dropped us down into the middle of it with the chopper blades tearing through the foliage. It was like flying a gigantic whipper snipper.’

‘That works?’

‘The rotor blades on the Huey have heavy counterweights on the tips,’ VT explained, ‘and if the vegetation isn’t too thick and you have a clear slot for the tail rotor, you can chop your way through.’

‘And if it’s too thick?’

‘That’s a whole ’nother ugly story,’ Jack said, ‘and if it had happened, we wouldn’t be here telling you about it. But VT got it right and we grabbed our backpacks and hit the frog and toad as soon as those bloody skids touched the dirt. Excellent timing, too. Probably didn’t get more than a couple of hundred feet away before the whole thing went up. Big bang, heat, concussion and we both got blown arse over teakettle and woke up several hundred yards further down the hillside.’

‘And nothing was broken?’

‘Nope. We were bloody lucky. Apart from the obvious scratches and bruises, I’ve got a couple of ribs that feel a bit ordinary and VT twisted his knee pretty badly, which is why it took us all that time to get down the mountain and find a friendly local to give us a lift to the nearest noodle shop, where you found us.’

Jack looked at Cartwright and smiled. ‘Quite a coincidence,’ he said.

I remembered that phone call in the Toyota and the bloke waiting on the motorcycle outside the café pocketing a wad of cash. I guessed Cartwright’s people had put the word out that they were looking for a couple of blokes who’d recently fallen out of the sky.

After lunch, Jack and VT got ready to head back to Macau while Cartwright gave me the full guided tour, with Heckle and Jeckle and their TEC-9s following at a discreet distance. If you discounted the security fences, the bodyguards and all the firepower, Cartwright’s joint was an oasis of calm. Chickens were scratching about, the trees were heavy with fruit, the air was clean and staff were feeding the fish or checking the water quality in the ponds. You could see why a bloke wouldn’t want to leave.

We took a breather out of the midafternoon sun in a small tile-roofed gazebo in a bamboo grove. It looked like it had been recently built on a landscaped area between two of the big ponds. A fresh pot of jasmine tea was waiting for us in a wicker basket.

‘This was the site of Pond 27,’ Cartwright said, handing me a cup. ‘I thought it would make a nice spot for a bit of contemplation and reflection.’

‘Pond 27?’ I said, looking around. ‘Given the lack of water, I guess the Yank bomb that hit this spot was a dud.’

‘There was a pond here but I had it filled in.’

‘Any particular reason?’ I asked.

‘What do you know about fish, Alby?’

‘Fresh is best,’ I said, ‘don’t overcook it and don’t order it in a restaurant on Mondays. And it’s probably wise to serve it with white wine to a purist like Jack.’

He smiled. ‘Right now, the world is in a fish-farming frenzy. I’ve got pilot projects growing Finnish rainbow trout in the central and northern highlands. You can grow them up to one and a half kilos in just twelve months, with a projected yield of up to thirty tonnes per hectare. Other people are working with sturgeon from Russia.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I had no idea it was that intensive.’

‘Here in Vietnam we do catfish, shrimp, even shellfish. And carp. The Vietnamese love carp, grow them in their rice paddies as well as on fish farms. They grow fast, too. Probably grow more carp than all the fish raised by aquaculture in Australia, but you can’t give the bloody things away to Australians – they don’t like the taste, reckon they’re muddy.’

‘Guess it’s all in how you prepare them. I’ve had carp in Japan and Spain, and even salt-roasted in Baghdad, and it was pretty damn tasty.’

‘People might just have to get used to eating all sorts of fish,’ Cartwright said. ‘Aquaculture has become the great hope for a planet with empty oceans. But one of the reasons the world’s stocks are almost depleted, apart from a century of mechanised overfishing, is that we have been scooping out fish from the oceans to make fishmeal to feed to farmed fish.’

‘That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.’

‘Exactly, especially when it can take up to five kilos of fishmeal to put one kilo on a farmed salmon. There are researchers working on this problem all over the world. They’re making fishmeal out of corn and soybeans and testing different qualities and quantities for different stages of the growth cycle. All well and good, I suppose, but now that corn is also used to make sweeteners and biofuels, other food crops are being displaced to feed this growing market.’

‘And your son is working on the problem?’

‘From a different angle. Peter wasn’t interested in better fish food: he was interested in a new and better fish.’

‘We don’t already have enough to choose from?’

‘What the world really needs is a robust, tasty, fast-growing fish that will eat almost anything and put on condition on the basis of a kilo of weight per kilo of food.’

‘I’d like to see that.’

‘So would I, Alby, but so far no-one has. However, it looked for a while that Peter might have been on the right track with something we were calling Project PB. We hoped it would become the world’s farmed fish of choice – a real coup for Vietnam and an economic boon for this region in particular. These people have been good to me, and they kept my secret for thirty years, so I owe them a lot.’

‘Can we whack one in a steamer with some ginger, soy sauce and spring onions and have a taste?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. The first batch should have been reaching plate size by now, but unfortunately there were … complications.’

‘Complications?’

Cartwright nodded. ‘Nine months ago Pond 27 was home to the pilot batch of PB, but we drained it, incinerated all the young fish with flamethrowers, filled in the pond, and the gardeners made me this spot to relax.’

‘Jesus, mate, flamethrowers?’

‘You’d be amazed at some of the stuff the Americans left behind, Alby.’

‘Sounds a bit drastic,’ I said. ‘Did they taste that bad?’

‘It wasn’t the taste of the fish that was the problem. It was their appetite …’ he paused for a moment, ‘… and their attitude.’

‘You raised fish with attitude?’

Cartwright refilled our teacups before he spoke. ‘Project PB was all about producing the perfect genetically engineered fish, and it took us almost five years. We based this new fish on wild barramundi for their desirable taste characteristics and because they’re euryhaline.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning they can live in both fresh and salt water which increases the farming options. We also made them more temperature tolerant so they could be raised as far south as Tasmania. Peter combined these positive attributes with the omnivorous and vigorous eating habits of certain members of the South American
Characidae
family, found mainly in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers.
Characidae
are more generally known as piranha.’

The piranha is a little freshwater fish with very big teeth and an even bigger appetite. South American folklore is full of stories of people or animals being attacked in rivers and creeks and winding up as a pile of bones in a matter of minutes.

‘And this particular barramundi-piranha combination didn’t really work out?’ I asked.

‘You could say that. Peter was working with the
Serrasalmus rhombeus
variety from Suriname in the northern part of South America, between French Guiana and Guyana, and it may not have been the wisest choice. What he finally produced was a large, fast-growing and delicious fish, but unfortunately also a savage and extremely aggressive one. They move in packs rather than schools, and apparently found us as palatable as we found them.’

‘Jesus! How big are these things?’ I asked.

‘We calculated that they could have grown up to a metre in length, but the damn things were aggressive right from hatching. One of our researchers unthinkingly dangled his hand in the water of Pond 27 from a boat and was nearly dragged in. The man lost his right arm up to the elbow. The flesh was stripped down to the bone in less than thirty seconds.’

Despite the tropical afternoon heat, I shivered.

‘I cancelled the project immediately,’ Cartwright continued, ‘and ordered the destruction of all our stock. Fish farming in this country is a labour-intensive enterprise and to my mind it wasn’t worth the risk.’

‘Smart move. Pity though. It sounds like your super fish could have been the answer to the world’s food problem.’

‘Some people say the problem the world faces today, Alby, isn’t a shortfall in food.’

‘Really?’

‘There are some who feel the problem the world actually faces is a surplus of people.’

I thought of the science-fiction film from the seventies in which Chuck Heston discovered the government was feeding an exploding population by secretly mincing up the dead, the elderly and the anti-social elements before adding a splash of food colouring and stamping them out as a tasty snack bar named Soylent Green.

‘Then maybe your Project PB was the solution, after all,’ I said. ‘We could have simply chopped up all those surplus people and fed them to your piranha-cum-barramundi.’

He smiled. ‘One possible solution, but probably not something that would be palatable to the politicians.’

‘Or to the punters lining up at the fish and chip shop – might have been a bit of a problem serving up a fish that could have been fattened on the homeless or their old Aunty Gwen.’

‘If your project was cancelled, and all the fish destroyed, what got you down to Saigon?’ I asked.

Cartwright said he had something he wanted to show me in the main house, so we started walking back in that direction.

‘You’ve heard of ANL Fischer Seafoods, right?’ Cartwright said.

‘The big fish wholesalers?’

He nodded. ‘ANL Fischer is a major importer of farmed seafood into Australia and the US. I picked up rumblings on the aquaculture grapevine that their CEO, Detlef Fischer, was expanding his business into fish farming through a new company called Fischer Aquaculture Industries. And when I began hearing rumours that he had a new fast-growing, great-tasting wonderfish out of Vietnam, I got a bit concerned.’

‘You think Fischer somehow managed to get his hands on a batch of your Project PB fish?’

Cartwright didn’t answer.

‘And if he did, he could breed more of these wonderfish to his heart’s content!’

Cartwright shook his head. ‘Characteristics built into genetically engineered fish that make them suitable for pond rearing could be a problem if the fish escaped and managed to breed with their wild cousins, so farming fish like ours are always deliberately bred sterile.’

‘And so the people who own the genetic blueprint can make an ongoing profit,’ I said, ‘selling the actual fish for food and the fingerlings for restocking.’

‘Exactly,’ Cartwright said.

‘Same as those genetically modified grain crops where the poor bloody farmer has to buy new seed every year.’

‘It took us five years of hard work and a major investment to produce Project PB, Alby, and we deserve a return on all that time and money. But after the accident I instructed Peter to destroy all the records and samples of the fish so that no more could be bred.’

‘But if Fischer was planning on farming these things, he’d need a guaranteed source of supply for the fingerlings.’

Cartwright nodded.

‘So was that what the blue outside your place in Saigon was all about?’

‘I told Peter about Detlef Fischer and the wonderfish rumours and asked him if he was involved. He denied any knowledge and things got a bit heated between us, I’m afraid. I wanted to believe him, but I’d made some inquiries and learned that Fischer had been visiting Saigon on a regular basis over the past six months.’