The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  Every third day Kranak gave the men a rest while they did their laundry. He felt it was the best thing for morale and discipline to make them do their laundry. “You guys wanna smell nice to them little Meo chicks, right?” he said.

  He washed himself and his clothes first. Then, while the men washed, Kranak sat with his back to them, the Armalite 18 across his lap, his chitinous eyes never seeming to blink as he watched everything move around them.

  “Where you figure they got us doin’, man?” Anderson asked Teel, beside him.

  “Just like the army. You know the army.”

  “He know the Stockade,” Fingus giggled. “Man, did he ever know the Stockade.”

  “I never fuck around wit’ them MPs,” Reyes said. “My two years inna army, I play eet rill cool till I rape that lady and everybody dump on me.”

  “Four more days,” Kranak said over his shoulder. “Then we get into the home stretch for the big time.”

  “What kinda big time you think that is?” Fingus asked.

  “Well since I am obviously the only fucking idiot here who has a brain in his head—in charge of a pack of fucking talking chimps, fahcrissake—I will tell you my guess. My guess is that the CIA hired us to knock off some North Viet capo—maybe old Ho, ho, ho Chi Minh himself.”

  “You think they want us for that?” Buckley said. “For a lousy twenty-five grand? Shit—they’re gonna hafta move that old fucker into some bargain basement like in some Hanoi department store before I help kill the little prick for that kinda money.”

  “Yeah.” Anderson snarled, instantly ready to make trouble. “What kinda rip-off is this?”

  “Easy, easy, easy!” Lieutenant Dawes said.

  “Listen, you guys,” Teel explained reasonably, “Kranak only tellin’ us his guess. Kranak ain’t gone know any more than you or me till we all see The Man, so don’t get your balls in an uproar.”

  “Well, shit,” Anderson said. “This is just too fuckin’ much like bein’ in the fuckin’ army. Man, I hate the army.”

  “Anyhow,” Fingus said, “how come William Buffalo in this? William Buffalo get me in this. Who got you guys in this?”

  “Buffalo … Buffalo … Buffalo,” so many different men said that it sounded like a hunting party of hungry Sioux out scouting for meat on the Great Plains.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Dawes asked hotly. “If William Buffalo puts a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars into a down payment for something, then you got to know there is going to be a big payday for everybody. William Buffalo is the coolest.”

  “Nobody said nothin’ to me ’bout no payday,” Anderson growled.

  “Why, sure. This got to be the Big Deal. Now you know it. William B. is The Man of all the men. Why, now it all come clear to me. We out here to take over a gigantic pile a skag, git it out and git it back to William B. You bet your ass there’s gone be a BIG payday.”

  “Don’ be a sheethead, Fingus,” Reyes said. “We de solchurs. We do de durty work.”

  “Soldiers?” Fingus said in such a comical way that all the men laughed. “I don’t see no soldiers. Maybe I sees some once soldiers but all I kin see now is a lotta piece men and bank robbers.”

  “Come on wit’ this soldier shit!” Buckley said. “Show me where the money is, show me who ta shoot ta get it, and I’ll handle it for you. The name a William Buffalo is good enough fa me.”

  “Where you from, Lieutenant?” Teel asked pleasantly.

  “Idaho.”

  “This is a funny place to find a West Point guy. I see your ring.”

  “My old man is a big anarchist. He never let up on me from the time I could talk. He even got me in this outfit.”

  “What’s a anarchist?” Lurky Anderson asked suspiciously.

  “We think all government is harmful and unnecessary. Some of us work to destroy all existing governments and one or two think we should change how people behave first.”

  “No keedeen?” Reyes asked. “People actually theenk like thod? You mean, first you read the book, then you throw the bomb?”

  “What the fuck you guys talkin’ about?” Dolly Fingus asked. “Is your Daddy happen to be William Buffalo?”

  “My father works for William Buffalo,” Lieutenant Dawes said proudly. “As an anarchist he believes heroin is a classical way to overthrow the government.”

  “What gummint?” Lurky Anderson said. “What kinda shit talk is that? Whatta you—some kinda Commie freak?”

  “I just told you,” Dawes said quietly. “I am here because I am an anarchist.”

  “An’ you say anarchists gone throw over the gummint? You think they git alia us here to throw over the gummint?”

  “What you care what we here for?” Reyes said. “It’s money in the bank, ri’? Sheet, I deen come all the way ott hirr to talk a lotta politics witchew guys. Come on. Who got the cards? We got time.”

  “Where you from, Cassebeer? What kinda name is Cassebeer?” Fingus asked.

  “New York.”

  “What was your West Point?” Dawes asked.

  Teel grinned. “MIT. I’m an experimental physicist.”

  “You mean you know how to make a nuke?” Dawes asked, eyes wider.

  “I kinda know your face from somewhere,” Fingus said.

  “All you got to know to make a nuke is that a tunable laser excites the two thirty-five, then the ultra-violet radiation knocks the electrons off the atoms and gives them an electric charge.”

  “Say, Cassebeer,” Fingus repeated. “Like how come I know your face?”

  “You don’ know my face. You know my sister’s face.”

  “Who dat?”

  “Agatha Teel.”

  “You ’bout the sixth cat who come up an’ say he Agatha Teel’s brothuh,” Anderson said nastily. “Evuhbody Agatha Teel’s brothuh—how come she don’t send two?”

  “She makes out like she’s with the poor man,” Kranak said from the tree, “but look in the papers and she’s always with the rich man.”

  “You outa you mind, Kranak. She the best. I git a little tahrd of all this shit you peddle,” Anderson yelled.

  Kranak stood up and threw the Armalite with two hands to Dawes. “Take my duty, Lieutenant,” he said. He turned to face Lurky Anderson. “Now I’m just gonna beat the crap outa you so you unnastan’ who you’re workin’ for.”

  Anderson stood up to his six feet four inches, moving his two hundred and twenty pounds lightly, and towering over Kranak.

  “Now you just go ahead an’ try that, you poor little fucker,” he said, moving fast toward Kranak.

  Kranak hit Anderson so hard that he knocked him right across the stream. Only the feet lay in the water.

  “Bring him around,” Kranak ordered. Buckley and Reyes jumped across the brook and began to slap Anderson’s unconscious face. “Wha’ hoppen?” Anderson said after two or three minutes.

  “Come on, come on!” Kranak snarled at him.

  Anderson shook his head, roared with rage and came up from the ground sprinting at Kranak. In about six or seven minutes Kranak had him all cut up.

  “Man, you sure can mix it,” Dolly Fingus said admiringly. “Lurky tough. Lurky usta fight in prelims.”

  “He was probably a dressmaker,” Kranak said. Everybody enjoyed that noisily. “All right!” Kranak snarled at them. “Pack it up and get it outa here!”

  They made the rendezvous without incident, seven hours ahead of schedule. They were deep in North Vietnamese territory. They waited near the Black River for the headman of the Muong to get there with his boatmen. There were about sixty thousand Muong in the Black River region. Their language was an archaic form of Annamese. Kranak could handle it.

  The Muong wore Annamite clothes (although they insisted they were Thai), but instead of the male dress being brown it was indigo blue. They were farmers who lived in houses on stilts. They had an aristocratic social organization and an indifference to sexual promiscuity.

  Seven light boats came,
each with a talisman in the bow: a live cockerel in a cage attached to the prow. The Muong knew that it was the presence of the cock that got the boats through the rough water. When the boat reached smooth water, the cock was killed and eaten. They didn’t need him anymore.

  The river course was enclosed by mountains. The heights of the mountain forest turned to deep blue against the light-blue haze in the high sinuous crevices. The river narrowed until they got to the Cho-Bo barrage where the rough water began. The Muong boatmen shot the rapids as if they were all birds seated on flying spears. They made it with the greatest of ease (excepting for the sensation of heart failure among the soldiers) into the Red River. They got to Lao-kay early in the morning and made a bad breakfast. Buckley said it was worse than Florida prison food. Fingus asked him if he ever tasted French Foreign Legion food. Buckley said, “How the fuck would I taste French Foreign Legion food? Anyways, everybody knows the French make great food.”

  Fingus spat. “I am tellin’ you this. That food, this mornin’, was worse than French Foreign Legion food.”

  Lao-kay was crowded into a narrow valley that was one of the natural entrances to China. The entrance itself was high up—far up from Mat-son at sea level. They were at the base of a wall of rock that soared like a city skyscraper. China lay more than a mile higher up.

  A smiling Hanoi government official came to find them at Lao-kay. He brought them identical suits of Chinese clothing. He spoke excellent English. He told them how happy he was to have their uniforms in exchange because his colleagues were able to use such true uniforms for re-indoctrinated American prisoners of war to accomplish many tricks in and out of combat.

  “Where we go from here, hombre?” Reyes asked directly.

  “You board that train.” The official pointed.

  “Where do the train goes?” Reyes asked.

  “Where? China. Where else?”

  “China!” Five men said the same word. Dawes and Teel kept their cool, but the others were incredulous.

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” the official asked.

  “We don’ know what we here for, man,” Anderson said. “You tell us what we here for.”

  “I assure you, sir,” the official said, “no information about your destination or your work was passed to me. I am here to apologize for your bad breakfast and to see you aboard the train.”

  They boarded. The seven men wore A-18s slung over their shoulders. Dawes carried two rifles, his own and Vorshuta’s, the GI Kranak had murdered. The Hanoi official issued them plastic identification cards printed in Chinese, carrying their individual pictures, which had been made on the spot. The cards were signed by high Chinese authority and stated their destination so that they also served the purpose of railway tickets.

  The train rumbled slowly over the old international bridge built by the French seventy-six years before. Although the journey had hardly begun, they changed trains on the Chinese side, at the Ho-k’u station, 250 feet above sea level. The Chinese customs men and army teams glanced at the plastic cards with boredom.

  The seven Americans sat in the long, low Michelin train with a diesel engine. It was packed with Tonkinese and Chinese, many elegant Chinese women. The train climbed swiftly over the road built by the French under a concession granted as one of the last gasps of the Chinese Imperial Government. The railway, one of the great engineering feats of railroading outside Switzerland and Peru, linked the harbor of Haiphong on the South China Sea with Kunming, the capital city of the Yunnan Province, 540 miles away.

  The tawny hillsides glowed in the morning light out of tangles of banana trees, palms, and shrubs of castor. Far, far below—down starkly abrupt precipices—the green waters of the Nam-ti raced, with sapphire-blue birds skimming the surface.

  “Where’s the fuckin’ war?” Kranak asked contentedly.

  The train climbed 6,000 feet in thirty-five miles, in and out of tunnels. Rhododendron bushes had taken over from the banana trees. The air was cool. They passed mud-walled villages where hundreds of human figures in every shade of blue moved in preoccupation. Bleak mountains and broad valleys succeeded one another. As the afternoon faded, the train reached the highest point on the railway, at 7,000 feet, before it began its descent into the heart of the Yunnan Province. The train flowed down the mountain to the wide, crowded valley, which had nine months of spring and one of the densest crops of people in the world.

  Kunming was in sight ahead of them. Its walls rose unchanged since Marco Polo had arrived as emissary of the Great Khan. They were in the cradle of China. They had completed the second leg of their journey.

  17

  1968–1969

  Before the CIA established Air Opium, the KMT had been able to get only 7 percent of the total Meo opium crop to market. Between March and June the great KMT caravans would begin their massive, slow descent from the heights of the north; a gorgeous elephant train carrying twenty tons of raw opium under the guard of five hundred troops.

  When Bart Simms was put in charge of reorganizing the opium arm of the huge CIA airline in Asia called Air America, it was already one of the largest publicly or privately owned airlines in the world (in combination with its other airline labels—Air Asia, the Pacific Corporation, and Southern Air Transport). The entire CIA facility was an airline and maintenance service with 160 heavy transport planes and 20,000 employees—3,500 employees more than the CIA itself. The maintenance company was larger than any military facility. It was based on Taiwan.

  Air Opium, Bart’s operation, was by far the most complex of the four agency units because it involved agricultural supervision of the opium (growing it to U.S. Department of Agriculture standards), the collection of the crop at the ninety-one USAID airstrips in five countries of Southeast Asia, and the operation of seven heroin conversion plants. Air Opium traveled from coordination of the primary work of the Meo tribesmen in high, burnt-out mountain clearings right down into the veins of American youth itself.

  Bart worked out of a company that existed behind a door marked G. Wherry and Company in Ta Pae Street in Muang Phayao. The war continued in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, but Bart moved freely across all inimical boundaries, tending the world’s opium patch for his government. He made fast friendships in China and in Hanoi. One of his closest friends in Asia was Lieutenant General Franklin Marx Heller, the bag man for the MACV command’s share of the heroin industry. Heller was based in Taiwan, the staging area for distribution. Heller was a fabulous host. He had the Air Force working for him and he put that organization to a lot of trouble when he entertained Bart in Taipeh. General Heller had all his own and his entertainment food cooked in the States because he said the fucking Chinks didn’t know anything about real food. With Heller, Bart would eat baked beans and clam chowder and codfish cakes straight from Boston. He was served schnitz un knepp: apples, dumplings, and ham from the Pennsylvania Dutch. Every time Bart flew into Taipeh they had something different: Kentucky burgoo made with squirrel meat; chicken and lamb with plenty of red peppers; Alabama fried pies filled with peach butter; catfish fry; and Milwaukee cheesecake flavored with lemon rind. Heller was such a stickler for the American Way that he got his hot dogs directly from the Sheboygan Bratwurst Festival and his kalbwurst straight from the Wurstfest at New Braunfels in the Hill Country of Texas. For a highly placed narcotics executive General Heller was an affable, pseudo-kindly man, but then, he was making a tremendous amount of money while still protecting his Army pension. Bart always hated to leave when the time came to go back to Muang Phayao. He made the trip to Taiwan after each delivery by his airline of one hundred tons of opium or ten tons of heroin, whichever had been invoiced.

  “There are an awful lot of people who haven’t bothered to find out the facts,” Bart told Enid. “I mean people who prefer to frown on The Agency’s operating in the narcotics business. My operation is making possible an enormous saving in foreign aid to those greedy Chinese ruling families on Formosa. By helping the Gissimo a
nd the Soongs we are actually helping the American taxpayer. Just look at the facts. Taiwan is about the greediest country for foreign aid anywhere today. In World War Two, General Heller says, they ripped off eight hundred and eighty million in gold bullion, for heaven’s sake. I mean—shit.”

  “Try to watch the swearing, hon,” Enid said.

  What enabled Bart to fly in and out of China and North Vietnam was that his plane carried special identification status (OPI-1) because of the economic importance of his work. He had to be away from Enid for an average of two days and one night a week while he traveled among the Meo farmers. No amount of Enid’s wheedling could get him to consent to take her along with him. It was too dangerous flying across those downdrafts in the mountain passes and there was also a war on.

  The Meo tribespeople were the last primitives to arrive in the Golden Triangle from the south of China. In upper Tonkin, Bart worked with opium-growing tribal resources of 40,000 Meo. He supervised the crops and crop delivery of 20,000 more on the Tranninh plateau of northern Laos. In Thailand he coordinated 30,000 Akha and Lahu. The Shan grew the crop for him in Burma.

  Because the Meo had come into the region only two or three centuries before, they had found the fertile valley bottoms occupied by Thai tribes and the lower mountainous slopes inhabited by Man tribesmen up to an altitude of about 3,000 feet. The Meo had had to accept the steep higher slopes. Opium was the only crop that would grow for them at altitudes of about 4,500 feet. They practiced ray, or forest clearing, by felling all growth, then reducing it to burnt ashes. The ashes produced good fertilizer for a year or two, but after that the soil became sterile and was abandoned. The method had disastrous consequences in the gradual deforestation of the country, but it made rich opium crops. Bart nursed along the industry of post-Stone Age people who toiled at the crop that was destroying western civilization to a greater degree than any plague or famine, shepherding his flock from a Chinook helicopter with a payload capacity of seven tons over a mission radius of 140 miles with 907 kilograms of bolted-on, built-in armor protection. Bart traveled with his own bodyguard of thirty Thai troops. His flying office ranged from the Yunnan Province of China down through Bun Thai and Pak Seng in North Vietnam to Xieng Mi and Muong Ki in Laos.