Colin Cotterill - Slash and Burn

Like the US cavalry, Peach arrived at that moment and fell into a discussion with Potter. It appeared the major wanted to wish everyone good luck on the day’s mission, lay down a few simple ground rules and inform the teams of the subgroups they’d be working in. Nothing at all about holidays. At some time during this housekeeping talk, Cousin Vinai slunk away.

When the others were loading the choppers, Siri, Commander Lit, Phosy and Civilai found him hiding in his room and surrounded him. Phosy had been designated the roles of good, bad and only cop while the others looked menacing.

“Comrade Vinai,” said Phosy.

“Yes?” said Vinai.

“The English language.”

“What about it?”

“Do you speak it?”

“I am the head of the foreign languages department affiliated to the Ministry of Justice.”

“Congratulations. But the question was, do you speak English?”

“I’ve translated entire documents into Lao.”

“From English?”

“Some.”

“And so you speak it?”

There followed a long pause during which Vinai appeared to be searching the ceiling for an answer.

“Not exactly,” he said.

The Lao felt obliged to inform the Americans of this turn of events. In fact, they had no choice. The loss of an interpreter was crucial to their work. They found Peach and took her to the major’s room where the team leader was sitting on the edge of his mattress going over a map of the region. The corner of a crate of whiskey peeked from beneath the bed between his feet. He crossed his legs to hide it. They tried to be as diplomatic and humble as possible, explaining that although Vinai was a leading authority on English language text, he had little opportunity to listen to the spoken form and he found the American accent to be almost incomprehensible. The major seemed unfazed by this news.

“Major Potter says it’s no big deal,” Peach translated. “We should just use the big woman.”

Siri assumed the major was referring to Dtui. Yes, she was … not fat exactly but casually ovoid. Definitely not big by American standards. And she most certainly had a vast repertoire of vocabulary that would be ideal when dealing with the forensic surgeon. But he didn’t understand how the major would know such a thing. He stared at Phosy whose buckled eyebrows seemed to mirror his own confusion.

“How does the major know about Nurse Dtui’s English skills?” Siri asked Peach.

“He’s not talking about Dtui,” she said after a short interlude.

“Then…?”

“He means the large gruff Lao woman who traveled on our helicopter yesterday. I didn’t notice her myself. The major says her English is fluent.”

“There weren’t any Lao scheduled to travel on your flight apart from the pilots,” Commander Lit said. “I checked the security arrangements.”

“This one turned up late. Your chopper had taken off and she hitched a ride with us.”

“But our team was complete, too,” Phosy said, shaking his head. “That’s why we took off. Nobody was missing.”

“And where is she now?” asked Civilai. “I didn’t notice any strange Lao in the breakfast room.”

Peach asked the major who laughed and got clumsily to his feet, nonchalantly back-heeling the crate under the bed as he did so. He put his arm around Civilai and led him to the window. He’d obviously missed the cultural sensitivity day at orientation. He pulled the flimsy curtain aside and pointed to a spot way beyond the back fence almost twenty meters into the no-go area. There on a deckchair in a one-piece orange bathing suit was a rotund woman in dark glasses and a sunhat. All this, irrespective of the fact that the morning sun had barely made a crack in the early mist.

“What on earth…?” said Commander Lit. “None of that land out there has been cleared of unexploded ordnance. Didn’t she see the signs? What’s she playing at? Is she mad? Who is she?”

But the other Lao in the group knew only too well who had followed them to Xiang Khouang, and it wasn’t a she .

Auntie Bpoo was as common a figure around the downtown area of Vientiane as Eros was to London and Jesus to Rio. A man, most certainly; deep voiced and pot-bellied and solid as a wad of sticky rice, but a slave to cross-dressing. He read palms and predicted the future on street corners and fooled nobody with his zebra-striped tank tops and lime green hotpants. But put him in a silk suit, plaster him in make-up and stick a permed wig on his head and he might just fool a helicopter full of Americans. Because that’s what had happened.

Far from being angry, Siri was impressed that the fortune-teller had been able to pull it off. The doctor hadn’t an inkling that Auntie Bpoo spoke English, but that didn’t surprise him either. He, she-and she preferred to be called “she”-was a remarkable … woman. Although she pretended that her soothsaying was a scam, that she just wanted an excuse to sit and talk to people, to make friends and be accepted in Lao society, Siri knew for a fact that she had an uncanny gift. Tangled deep in her quirkiness and her unfathomable poems and her mood and gender swings, was a person who actually could see the future. Siri needed someone like her to help explain his own untrained connection to the spirit world. Yet so far she’d played dumb. He wondered whether, here in the wilds of Phonsavan with no escape, he just might be able to get some sense out of her. All that could come later. For now they had to convince her to put on something respectable and take a ride with them to Spook City.

The two choppers were nearing Long Cheng. They’d just flown over Sam Thong, ten minutes to the north. It was deserted now but in the early seventies it had housed 150,000 refugees. The US would fly journalists there to view the USAID humanitarian program. They wanted the world to see what a solid job they were doing to help the masses of poor people displaced by the fighting-fleeing the Pathet Lao, they called it. What the administrators didn’t mention was that the refugees were actually fleeing US bombing. Entire areas were evacuated so the CIA’s Hmong fighters had an empty playing field for combat. Chased from their homes, all these displaced people had become dependent on US airdrops. Another thing the journalists didn’t know was that a few kilometers over the ridge was the real war effort, the launch pad for the forward air arm leading up to a thousand sorties a day-Long Cheng.

The choppers crossed over a saddleback mountain and were careering down into the Long Cheng valley. The highlight of the macadam airfield was a drastic limestone karst at the end of the runway. Fliers called it the vertical airbrake because if you overshot, it was a most effective method of slowing down, albeit terminal. Many of the surrounding huts had been stripped of their tin roofs, and bamboo shacks, victims of neglect, extended far up into the surrounding hills. But there were signs of domestication here and there, suggesting that life might return to the place one day. The helicopters landed beside the old runway. A few dozen ponies were tethered to pipes and shrubs. Already, several hundred people were milling around the ruins of Spook City. They’d probably heard the erroneous rumors about the Americans paying a thousand dollars for old bones and wreckage. Some had traveled for days to this isolated outpost. The theory had been that only the really serious claimants would go to that much trouble. If they’d set up their camp in a town on a main road the searchers would have been inundated. And, as Commander Lit had rightly said, if the explosion of Bowry’s helicopter had been heard from Long Cheng, he really couldn’t have gone that far. The villagers approached the two helicopters and stood with their eyes closed as the rotors kicked up dust. The teams carried their equipment down a shallow dip and along a narrow path. For convenience, they would be working out of General Vang Pao’s old residence. It was a concrete, two-story outer-suburb motel of a place, as incongruous as the shirt-and-tie spooks who’d built it. Although the furniture had been removed, it wasn’t that much less comfortable than the Friendship Hotel. And, as most of the bombing in the region had originated from here, it was quite possible to stroll around without the fear of being blown up.