Jake Fonko M.I.A. (20 page)

9

The edge of
the plateau dropped away behind us and Driffter’s little fortress soon became indistinguishable, lost among the jumble of hills and trees in the distance. Then our climb took us up into the overcast, and everything disappeared into a grey fog. “Haw, got some good out of those tuskers after all,” Driffter chortled.

“I thought your workers used them in the fields,” I remarked.

“Oh yeah, they did, but that wasn’t why I had ‘em. We were collectin’ them. The munchkins would bring one in every now and then, strays they found wandering out in the hills. When we got enough for a shipment, I was going to knock ‘em off and sell the ivory. Had a buyer lined up, but it wasn’t worth the trouble for just a few. It was penny ante business anyhow,” he mused. “They can put ‘em to use back there, and welcome to ‘em. I wish ‘em luck.”

Now that we were safely airborne, I turned my attention to Soh Soon. She was sitting on the floor of the cabin with our duffels among an assortment of crates and boxes and loose gear. I could see why Driffter had had trouble gaining speed and altitude for take-off: he’d loaded the cargo space cram-full to capacity. Soh Soon acted agitated. “Jake,” she said, right in my ear so as to be heard over the chopper noise without shouting, “he try go away without you. If you not run so fast, he leave you back there with others.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Soon as you get elephants going, he run back to chopper, shoot guard, get in, tell me to get out and help you. I say no. He real mad, but no time for argue, went to controls and start take off. That why I yelling you to hurry. We got problems, I think.”

“For the time being, we’re okay,” I assured her. “We’re on our way out.” I made a closer inspection of the stuff in the cabin. Driffter hadn’t come away with much by way of personal belongings that I could see. Rather, he’d taken off with all the saleable cargo the helicopter could carry. Packing crates of M16 rifles, and cases of rounds to go with them. A big stack of M72 shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons. Redeye anti-aircraft rockets. Czech grenade launchers and crates of rocket-propelled grenades. Electronics gear. Several sealed wood boxes, contents not indicated but I could pretty well guess what. And the strangest assortment of spare parts I’d ever seen—structural members. But structural members don’t fail. You need spares for working parts—those are the ones that ground you. That was why Driffter’d kept those three Hueys, I’d bet—cannibalize two of them to keep the third one flying.

The spares in the crates didn’t look quite right. They were roughly finished and seemed vaguely out of spec. The paint on them didn’t match—unusual in U.S. military equipment, for which uniformity and interchangeability are key requirements. I picked one up, an angle-iron piece with a bend in it, to have a closer look. It was heavier than it looked—way too heavy. I hefted another, and another. Same story. Felt like they were made of lead… or gold? I banged the edge of one against the edge of another to chip some paint off. Solid gold. The whole box. Several boxes of those structural members. That must have been what those workmen were up to in those handicraft shops in Driffter’s village.

Soh Soon saw the gold, and her eyes went wide, then narrowed as she started doing mental arithmetic… ten pounds per part, and 20 parts per crate, and (count ‘em) 7 crates times (how much was bullion worth per ounce in those days, $200?) equals… too much for 
me
 to work out just then… a lot, no doubt. Leave that kind of figuring to her. The chances were that those wood boxes held heroin, worth more than its weight in gold. The weapons would bring in a good dollar too—plenty of folks around the world were still in the market. Driffter could peddle those tank rippers for $5,000 each, minimum. He was heading home a wealthy man, even if he did leave his Continental back in the hills.

Seeing the weapons reminded me that I still had a couple of those flash-bang grenades stuffed in my pockets. I took them out and stuck them in one of the crates of solid-gold spares, where they wouldn’t bounce around. I pointed them out to Soh Soon, so that she wouldn’t blunder into them. She acknowledged with a nod. No use trying to talk any more than necessary, as the noise drowned everything out. Driffter leaned around the door and asked, “You folks okay back there?”

I heard him, but barely. I squeezed forward through the gap in the cargo and took the co-pilot’s seat. We were clipping along smartly now. We’d climbed above the overcast and were scudding over a vast, cottony carpet, shining a painful white under the clear, bright sun. Off to our right, the glistening pile of thunderhead loomed up thousands of feet above us. There wasn’t another airborne object in sight, bird or plane: we owned the Cambodian sky. “This thing’s got a good ceiling of operations?” I commented.

“About twice of a Huey’s,” he answered. “These Sea Sprites are right nice craft. The navy uses ‘em for search and rescue work, anti-sub, and just about everything else. Utility choppers, ship based, usually. Rugged. Good navigation and communications gear. No armament, but I wasn’t in the combat business anyhow. For workhorse jobs the Huey Iroquois is okay, a little slow, but nobody was sending air power up after me, so that didn’t make no difference, and I had refueling points between my place and Laos. For long hauls you can’t beat this baby—more speed, higher ceiling, twice the range. I was saving it for my homecoming—figuring there might be refueling problems, I wanted to make it all the way out of Cambodia non-stop. Never used this one for routine business runs, didn’t have spares to maintain it. I stripped out a lot of extra equipment, made extra space, to get the max out of her. Good thing I did, too, ‘cause she’s really loaded down right now. Had to crank her up higher than I’d wanted to, getting clear of the hanger, came close to pulling everything down on top of us.”

“Sounds like you know your choppers.”

“Not to be braggin’, but you’ll find few better,” he said. “They didn’t codename me DRAGONFLY for nothing. I put a Huey through a 360 degree roll one time, just to see if I could do it. Scared the curds and whey out of my co-pilot. I swore him to secrecy, but he put in for a transfer and refused to fly with me ever again. Can’t blame him. It was a damn fool thing to do. Scared me too.”

“According to my CIA rap sheet, you were downed twice. That how you came by those two extra Hueys?”

“You guessed it, Fonko. I was pressing my luck, but I needed them for spares. I was afraid the CIA wouldn’t believe my story the second time around, but they swallowed it. Guess they had to. They couldn’t of replaced me, and they daren’t call attention to what I was up to out there. Wouldn’t want word to get back to the wrong folks in Washington, be sheer hell to pay if our Cambodia activities got leaked.”

“So, how’d you come by the Sea Sprite?”

“I was real lucky,” he said. “God delivered it right into my hands.”

Here we go again, I thought. “That so?”

“Yep. I was just starting to get things rolling up there, only been missing for a couple months. The Company sent a team out to search for me. I guess they really thought I needed rescuing, or mebbe they suspected something. They never would have found me, but when I saw this baby circlin’ around so pretty up in the sky, I just knew I had to have it. So I got ‘em on the radio and talked ‘em on in.”

I was afraid to ask what happened next. Not to worry. He went on to tell me. “Well, it was a navy pilot and co-pilot, and two CIA men, Al and Ben, they’d flown over from a carrier off the Nam coast, top secret mission. We set down and popped a few beers, and we talked helicopters and old times and such, and pretty soon I’d sweet-talked the pilot and co-pilot into taking me up for a spin. Left Al and Ben on the ground with a couple of them cute little mountain gals to keep ‘em company, they was happy to see us leave. I guided the pilot about fifty miles south. I watched real careful, and before long I knew enough to fly it myself. Then I asked them how the navy went about radioing their position, wanted to see if they did it the same way as the CIA, I told them. So the co-pilot radioed into base, which he’d been on the verge of doing anyhow, and as soon as he’d given our position I shot him. Then I shot the pilot. Then I threw the bodies out, and I had me a Sea Sprite.”

Recalling the map in my instructions, Todd Sonarr had indicated Driffter’s suspected location with a shaded area about fifty miles south of his actual hideout. It took every bit of self-control I had not to grab him by the throat and strangle him. Of course if I did that, Soh Soon and I were dead meat too. “What about Al and Ben?”

“Well, they were sort of stuck there, neither of them being pilots. Plus my munchkins had the drop on them. I meant them no harm, just didn’t want them causing me any trouble. I had my munchkins tie them up, and then I fed them chow laced with heroin until they were pretty well hooked on it. After a time it was safe to let them go, because I controlled their supply. Loyalty enhancement, you might call it. I gave ‘em each a cute little mountain gal, to make them feel all right. Pretty soon they adjusted to it. You think I’d kill them? Hell, Fonko, they’re good men. I needed somebody to ride herd on my munchkins, white people to talk to. I’d a been crazy to let guys like that go to waste!”

“You ever have any Russian visitors?”

“Oh, you heard about those jerks? You get around, you do. Yeah, a couple KGB agents found their way up to my place, came in nosin’ around. Wanted to work up some kind of deal with me. I was doing okay by then, didn’t need any partners.”

“What happened to them?”

“They kept pestering me, really obnoxious about it. No manners, just pushy bastards, you know what I mean? What could I do? Couldn’t let them go, they knew too much. Couldn’t keep them around, all they’d have been was trouble.”

“So?”

“So I had my munchkins shoot ‘em and throw the bodies over the cliff. Hell, what would 
you
 have done in my place?”

It was a situation I doubted I’d ever be in. “So now you’ve got away scot free, and Al and Ben are stuck back there in the hills?”

“I can see what you’re driving at, Fonko, but don’t judge me too harsh. I do as right by my people as I can. Take old Grace down there in Phnom Penh. She’s got enough stashed away in Switzerland to retire on, and all she did was, for about a year and a half, let me in on what equipment the CIA was shipping to where, and who was interested in my whereabouts. I couldn’t very well bring Al and Ben back with me. How would I explain 
them
? Just having them there’d be evidence enough to put my neck in a noose. Up in that pretty little valley, they’ll do all right. I’ve set it up real secure. It’s self-supporting, and the climate’s as close to perfect as you’re going to find. They’ve got their mountain gals, with babies on the way. It’ll be rough on them for a couple months while they cold turkey off that heroin. But once they get things settled amongst themselves, they’ve got their own private little paradise up there, the kind of setup office workers back in the States spend their coffee breaks dreaming about. Shoot, I left enough gold back there to make ‘em all rich. I cut and run, I’m not denying that. I’m a businessman, not a social worker. But can you truthfully say that when the U.S. government cut and run, they left their folks in Cambodia and Nam in as good shape as I left mine?” There was a pregnant pause. “If a man were to take a broadminded view, he might even realize that there ain’t a single thing I did up there in my little valley, that I didn’t do previously as an employee of Uncle Sam. So, mebbe you can tell me what’s the difference?”

“What about getting Al and Ben hooked on drugs?”

“When Air America flew out of Laos with all that hill-tribe heroin, where do you suppose we took it? Straight down to airfields in Nam—Pleiku, Ban Me Thout. Sold it to the locals, and what do you suppose 
they
 did with it? You ‘member how so many of our troops was gettin’ hooked on H, around 1970 or so? Thousands of ‘em—bored, homesick, miserable, and their clean-up-ladies offerin’ it to ‘em so cheap, take their minds off their troubles the easy way. Hell, we sure created our fair share of drug addicts back in those days. Working for the CIA did have one big advantage, though. It spared me the pain of having to look ‘em in the eye every morning.”

“The navy pilot and co-pilot, guys on your own side?”

His eyes wandered, and his face softened for a moment. A painful memory passing through? .”..if you work in covert counter-insurgency long enough,” he said slowly and deliberately, “you’ll sooner or later find yourself in the kind of situation that… don’t bring out the best in a man. Anyhow,” he concluded, “those guys weren’t on my side when I did it.”

It seemed like a good time to switch the discussion to a more immediate issue. “Soh Soon tells me you tried to leave 
me
 back there too.” No harm in asking. I mean, there we were, 8,000 feet in the air, at the mercy of a psychopath. How could it make our situation any worse?

Driffter seemed amused. “I’ve had a lot on my mind lately, what with the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong taking over, and the US pulling out and so forth. I’ve done right well for myself, but the time’s come to call it quits out here. So, what next? I don’t want to go off and live like some kind of hermit, no matter how much money I have. How many years have I been crashing around in these rotten jungles? Too damned many. I want to be back among my own people, have some folks I can talk to. Course, if I just showed up, there’d naturally be a lot of questions. What you been up to these last eighteen months, Clyde Driffter? Where’d you come by that Sea Sprite? How’d you come by all that money you’re spending? You see my problem. Answers for those questions weren’t coming easy to me.

“When Poon’s boys came by to see about flying you folks out, I figured there might be some advantage in it. You could be hostages, or something. But that was a foolish idea—hostages get messy. No way to win that game. So I figured to stall around until a good idea came to me. Then my munchkins found that Jack Philco stuff in your duffel, and my problem was solved. No reason to stick around a minute longer.”