The Whisper of the Axe Page 9

  “The best thing is that you know just what the other men in Three Platoon know—and that’s all. Except you also gone know I am the mover behind it. But—it goes without sayin’, baby, even the wild horses can’t drag that out of you. Okay. Tomorrow you gone in the army for a while but it all comes up roses at the other end. You gone get the finest training in the production of nuclear energy that any experimental physicist at your level ever had, you hear?”

  “How you gone do that, Ag?”

  “Never mind. Just trust. Say your sister Aggie told you that so it’s gone happen.” She smiled at him tenderly. “Just like everything else I ever said is gone happen, happens. Now you just save yourself. Get along with them six other guys. You got to. But just be friendly; don’t mix in with them. Save yourself so that when all of you get where you’re goin’ your mind will be wide open so you can easy walk away from them without feeling blue and lonesome and settle down to learn everything you got to learn about that nuclear power and how to design it to fit packages our people will be able to walk around with. Okay?”

  “Yes, ma’am. What food! But where we gone that I find out all this here?”

  “I’m gone tell you so, all over again, just like it was the first time, you gone know I trust you. You gone to China. You gone study with them crafty Chinese.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you.”

  “We’re walkin’ up toward the edge now, baby. We gone make it right to the edge—then we gone jump in.”

  “Does it make any mind where I check into this army?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If I’m gone to China I got to get to Washington first.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged clumsily. “A girl.”

  “You never said a thing!”

  “Not much to say, Ag. Jessa girl.”

  “You want to say good-bye?”

  He grinned, “Sometimes good-byes can be nice. They can get you results you might not get otherwise.”

  Teel smiled back at him. “No, then it doesn’t matter where you enlist. Just remember to tell me where they station you after they take you in.

  “One other thing, baby,” she added. “I got you a brand-new birth certificate. You gone enlist under the name of Albert Cassebeer.”

  Jonas, who was to be his own man, smiled weakly.

  15

  March 1969

  “Nations,” Bart explained to Enid while they rested happily on the large double bed one night, “have come to prize and protect their rights to profit from opium and heroin just as sincerely as they prize and protect their interests in copper, oil, uranium and coffee.”

  “Balance of payments—don’t forget that,” Enid said.

  “But not entirely. Political leaders guard heroin with the lives of their people because it is so much more profitable than, for example, some resource such as oil.”

  “And everybody knows oil people are always making money so they are always throwing rocks at oil people. We hardly ever see people throw rocks at politicians.”

  “Profits from heroin drench politicians, hon. Heroin could not get itself sold anywhere without earnest cooperation from politicians. The greater the market—like the United States—the greater the political involvement on every level from the corner cop to the White House.”

  “I honestly don’t know how people can shoot chemicals into their bloodstream. It is disgusting. But they certainly do it. I mean, more every day.”

  “The profits are almost beyond man’s ability to count. If every man has a price, then heroin brings ten thousand times the price of any man.”

  “That scans, Bart. I mean, that could like be a line from Polonius.”

  “Exactly—as follows night the day the gross annual income from heroin sales in the United States alone is sixteen billion two hundred million dollars. The street price for one kilogram of heroin is one million two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “It’s like buying a Rolls. The time to get one is when you are, say, twenty-one. The car lasts for seventy years so the twenty-five thousand you pay comes out to about three hundred and fifty a year.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, the thing to do is to buy your kilo of heroin when you’re—say fourteen. That should last you for at least twenty years—if you can last twenty years with your arms and your head in shreds,” Enid explained, “so it brings down the unit cost of your fixes.”

  “If you do that, buy wholesale, because the raw material from which the kilo was made—that is ten kilos of raw opium—cost six hundred dollars. From maker to wearer, the cost of the product goes up two thousand times.”

  “No industry could be that greedy.”

  “It isn’t the industry, it’s the politicians and police and enforcers who are so greedy. They want such a big cut that the sale price of heroin at entry in New York has risen from twelve thousand dollars a kilo to twenty-six thousand. Jesus, hon, the re-sale price to the first wholesaler in New York is thirty-five thousand dollars—or forty-two thousand in Chicago. He cuts his kilo with lactose and the wholesaler has two kilos, then he sells each one for forty-eight thousand a kilo in order to be able to afford to pay the politicians.”

  “How much is a kilo, sweetheart?”

  “Two point two pounds.”

  “That’s not much—I mean not if you had King Kong on your back.”

  He looked blank.

  “I made a joke,” Enid said.

  “The thing is that the kilo is cut and re-cut, then cut again until its value, in five-dollar bags, reaches a million two. Then what did they do, for Christ’s sake? The dealers lowered the content of each five-dollar bag from twelve to five miligrams.”

  “I read the book.”

  “What book?”

  “Panic in Needle Park.”

  “They got a book out of the weight drop in five-dollar bags?”

  “What a book!”

  “Well, it takes a lot of heroin to fill all the little bags they sell. Fifteen tons a year, the United States needs. That’s thirteen thousand five hundred kilos. At a million two a kilo. No wonder lawyers’ fees are so high when politicians get into trouble.”

  “Those terrible men,” Enid said. “And I lapped up Mr. Deeds on television.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington—to get rich on protection money.”

  “Well there’s just so much heroin money. Anybody can make heroin. The processing costs nothing. It’s the splits that cost so much.”

  “How do they make it, darling?”

  “Heroin is only diacetylmorphine, an alkaloid obtained by heating a mixture of morphine and acetic acid. Heroin was first produced by the German firm of Bayer in 1898. They thought they had developed a miracle drug.”

  “What a drug! And it’s a miracle that anybody survives it.”

  “Politicians survive it. That’s what it’s sold for. It can be made in the bathtub at home like Prohibition citizens used to make gin. You just start out with impure heroin—a mixture of base morphine and acetic acid heated for six hours in a double boiler at a temperature of eighty-five degrees centigrade. To make base morphine out of opium all you do is let the raw opium simmer in water, then precipitate it with quick lime to separate all the vegetable elements and isolate the morphine and codeine.”

  “Mama used to give us codeine a long time ago. Do you wish those times were back, Bart?”

  “No.”

  “Funny that Mama should give us codeine.”

  Bart was wound up. He wanted to keep talking like Tom Swift. “Then you strain away the impurities you can see, add a pinch or so of ammonium chloride and you have base morphine. It’s crystallized powder. The color of milk chocolate. Of course, making heroin can be dangerous work. It can all blow up if the temperatures are wrong or it can come out less pure than eighty percent, which would mean the American market won’t touch it and the American market is the name of the game.”

&nb
sp; “Times they are a-changin’,” Enid said. “Whatever happened to martinis on the rocks with an olive? I tell you, doll, the only things that last are the habit-forming things. Like love and fear.”

  “And heroin. Given these kinds of profits, the politicians will see to it that forty percent of the population will be hooked by the year two thousand. And we’re not about to run out of opium to make the stuff. Right where we are now, the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, ships twelve hundred tons of opium a year. And they did very effective merchandising from here for the American market. In 1964 the bar girls of Saigon were put on sales promotion to turn the GIs off booze and beer and on to heroin. There are seven processing plants operating in the Golden Triangle. Then our airline, Air Opium, flies it out to Vientiane where US military aircraft take it into Saigon. The American Army command and the ARVN provide protection and transport for the Five Passport Chinese racketeers who provide the financing, conversion and collection of the crop. Everybody gets rich. A lot of kids’ lives are ruined but everybody gets rich.”

  “There must be a Greater Consciousness and a Higher Scheme behind all that, Bart. I mean—the friendly neighborhood padre has explained away much more than heroin in his time. Why should we wince?”

  “Hon, I don’t wince. We’re here to get a job done for The Agency, and I’m doing it.”

  “It just seems so screwy that The Agency would get mixed up in stuff like heroin.”

  “Well! Defense! National security! In 1949 the remnants of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army—they call them the KMT, the people’s national party—one of the few parties made up entirely of politicians with no constituency—was driven out of what had suddenly become Communist China into Burma, twelve kilometers from the Thai border. The KMT troops settled in. They took Shan or Yao or Lahu wives. They overthrew the local chieftains. When they were beefed up by the locals they were a fighting force of almost fourteen thousand men.”

  “A gang. A gang of crooked Chinks.”

  “In the early fifties they caught the imagination of the CIA.”

  “I bet.”

  “The Agency saw the KMT as preventing Communist filtration in Southeast Asia.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “They even saw it as invading and pinning down a part of China itself, so they supported the KMT with weapons and materiel.”

  “While the KMT went into the dope business.”

  “Exactly! This year the KMT has control of eighty percent of the traffic in the largest opium-producing area of the world.”

  “But—?”

  “Well,” Bart grinned, “they had the opium and if they could get it to Taiwan they could get big money. The Agency had the transport. So a deal was made because The Agency figured out that it wouldn’t cost them a cent out of their secret appropriations anymore—to support the KMT, that is—so they agreed to transport.”

  “That’s all,” Enid said mockingly, “just transport.”

  “Well, in the best construction on that—yes. But when the USAID built ninety-one landing strips to move the opium and heroin out of the high mountains, it was just that a lot of irrelevant people got rich, the Taiwanese and the American high command in Vietnam and a lot of greasy criminals.”

  16

  April 1971

  Moving north along the ridges and high valleys of the cordillera, Kranak ran everything. Lurky Anderson asked him as they moved along, “Hey, Kranak. How come they make you the boss?”

  “You wanna lead the way?” Kranak said. “Be my guest. Go ahead. Lead the way.”

  “I din’ say that. Don’ put shit in my mouth, man. I ass you how come they pick you.”

  “Because if they picked you we’d be up shit creek,” Kranak said. “I spent nearly three fuckin’ years in these mountains in Special Forces. I speak the languages—Meo, Viet and Chinee. Now what the fuck do you thinka that, shithead?”

  He had the six men dig sleeping trenches which were snowflake-shaped. They slept with their heads together, their feet at the perimeter; rifles beside them. Kranak knew how to live off the land. He held command easily.

  “You musta done plenty of soldiering,” Orin Dawes said. “You sure know how to move these guys around.”

  “What the hell, Lieutenant, I was an A Team Sergeant. This is nothing.”

  “Well, just the same. It’s a pleasure. I’m learning as I go along,” Dawes said.

  “That’s the name of the game, Lieutenant.”

  Of the seven men four were black: the officer, Lieutenant Dawes, Jonas Teel, Lurky Anderson and Dolly Fingus. Fingus was almost as mean-looking as Kranak. Lurky Anderson was a big, ugly man with a cut-up face and chips all over his shoulders. Reyes was a Puerto Rican with a happy disposition. He was happiest when he was making trouble. He wished a happy life to anybody who would throw rocks at a cop. Buckley was a big city Mick. It didn’t matter what city. He waved the IRA flag and refused to take a bath wherever he was.

  “Hey, Kranak,” Lurky Anderson said, always hoping for a little friction. “Whatta you? You ain’t no Spic and you ain’t no Wop.”

  “I ain’t no fuckin’ nigger either, baby.”

  “Watch yo’seff!”

  “In your hat, black boy.”

  “Well-what are you?”

  “I am a Lipan Apache.”

  “Wassat?”

  “I am a North American Indian. My people made America with their hands. And one other thing, baby.”

  “Wassat, Tonto?”

  “I hate niggers.”

  Kranak was maybe forty. Fingus and Buckley were in their middle thirties. Dawes and Teel were late twenties. The rest were kids.

  Kranak told them to keep their mouths shut on the trail. “You think we’re all alone up here,” he said. “But you don’t know nothing. This is like a main street. Cong and Montagnards and traders are moving north and south all around us all the time.”

  “Nobody gone tell me to keep my mouth shut,” Anderson snarled.

  “Hey, Anderson!” Buckley said in a low voice. “You want the shit kicked outa you? You know what is six guys all kickin’ you inna head the same time? No more head, that’s what it is. So keep your mout’ shut, you hear?”

  On the second day they lay flat and quiet when a long party of either merchants or Cong went along the narrow trail moving southward with rifles hung across their backs and high, heavy packs on their heads.

  They were high up and it was cool. Kranak kept them moving at about twenty-nine miles a day. They were hard men, very fit men. There were 368 miles to go to the rendezvous point, he told everybody on the second night while they were lying over.

  “Whatta we gone do when we gits there?” Fingus asked in a whisper.

  “What the hell you care?” Reyes answered in the darkness. “You got twenny-fi’ grand, ri’?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Fingus said, “but who wants to be a fuckin’ grunt for twenty-fi’ grand? I wanna know where we goin’.”

  “We’re goin’ north. What else? Wait’ll you get hit before you start cryin’.”

  “Whose cryin’, man? I askin’.”

  “You know where we goin’, Kranak,” Buckley said. “I mean, like, if you know it’s three hunnert and some miles, then you know where we’re goin’.”

  “Listen—every guy here—now get this straight for once an’ for all. This is what I know. Nothing else—all right? We are going to a river. You guys ever see a river? We are gonna get in some fuckin’ canoes and some fuckin’ natives are gonna paddle us someplace. That’s all.”

  “What do you figure from that, Kranak?” Dawes said.

  “Well, I figure when the fuckin’ natives get us there, somebody will be waitin’ there. And whoever is waitin’ there will tell us what they paid us the twenty-five grand to do. What else can it happen on us, fahcrissake, Lieutenant?”

  “Listen, Kranak,” Buckley whispered. “You know the territory. Many little broads around here?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Sens
ational!”

  “Listen, you know how long it took the guys in my outfit—healthy, strong guys—to screw one of these little broads?”

  “How long? What you mean? Like a haffa hour, five minutes or something?” Buckley said.

  “No, no! I mean how long before they could get themselves to screw these broads. The broads climb all over you. You got to hold a gun on them they want it so bad.”

  “I don’t get it. I should guess how long and I win? Three seconds, I guess,” Buckley whispered.

  “The shortest was eighteen days.”

  “How come? Are they that ugly or are they female impersonators?” Buckley asked.

  “Because they stink, baby. They don’t believe in washing like nobody you ever smelled.”

  “I bet it won’t take me any eighteen days,” Buckley said. “I bet you twenty dollars I can do it in twelve days.”

  “I bet you I can do it in three,” Reyes said.

  They trailed through very high country, sometimes stopping at Meo villages to rest, watching the opium crop being brought in from as far as nine miles away. And smelling the women. Dawes had to wrap shorts around his head the stench was so bad.

  “Twenty bucks,” Kranak said to Buckley.

  “Maybe I better pay you now,” Buckley said. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it.”

  Kranak knew what the Meo liked and, in exchange for information, money, or presents, the party was made welcome—but only at two villages where Kranak had once lived and beside whose men he had fought. The Meo women were ever ready to scrag any one of the American party, even after the kind of day’s work they had to put in dragging the opium crop up the mountains, but the seven men asked the headman to protect them and settled for a little skullpop and sleep. Everybody knew Kranak would have them off and moving fast before dawn the next day.

  Kranak was a big man with wary eyes. Both his parents had been Lipan Apaches but, early in Kranak’s life, his father had come into some money and moved the whole family out of the southwest into New Jersey where he had died of booze. Kranak rarely told anyone he was a Lipan. Since the 1830s there hadn’t been any blacks to lean on worth a damn in the whole Southwest Territory and, as soon as the Indians were herded into reservations, they had become the niggers of the region. All his life Kranak carried the fear that people might somehow confuse the idea that being a full-blooded Lipan Apache Indian—the bravest, most resourceful, and cruelest of any North American Indian tribe—was somehow mixed up with being a nigger. For that reason Kranak abominated niggers.