and that was why he gave me the moment. “The last one, I don't know if he died with the NVA commander who took him. That commander 'died' in a plane crash, had a funeral, and they buried what was left: this.” He pulled a small plastic baggy out of his pocket. In it were a few teeth and some ashes.
“And that's why you need me, to tell you if that's your VC commander.”
“He was NVA.”
“But I thought you said they were Viet Cong.”
“Same fucking thing- they all marched to the beat of Hanoi's drummers.” I took the bag from him and looked at it. I'd heard of him. The OiC here in Hanoi, he said he was like an urban myth, a story the VC tell to their children: the Ghost of Saigon. But he was real, inside my apartment, larger than a man ought to get, the infamous murderer-Marine, dripping rain on my rug.
I thought a moment, about who he was, and what helping him might mean, then I brushed it aside and looked at the bag.“Well, the teeth are your best option. Teeth are durable, keep their shape well; they might even house mitochondrial DNA, which wouldn't necessarily identify him, just tell you whether or not it's from the same family line. But what you've told me about these bastards, if one of them were going to fake his death, I wouldn't really put it past one of them to kill a relative to really sell it.” He glowered at me. “Which doesn't actually matter anyway. All of our DNA sequencing is done out of the AFDIL lab in Rockville, Maryland, and since this isn't an official JPAC case they'd never look at it; and like I said, it's no smoking gun anyway. But the teeth could give us our identification- if we had dental records.”
He paused for a moment. “I can get dental records.” And he left.
I don't have anything close to a full lab in my apartment, but I do keep a few magnifying glasses and a cheap microscope, because work has a way of coming home with me (at least it always did on Oahu). He came back three hours later, with a series of small cuts, from broken glass, I think, on his left wrist. I'd already half come to a conclusion, but I didn't let on until I'd looked at the records.
“This is ridiculous. Clumsy, stupid. They tried to mock up the teeth to look like, what'd we say this guy's name is?”
“Hoa Lo.”
“Yeah. At first I took some of these markings as just the lousy state of Vietnamese dentistry in this guy's lifetime, but look here, you see this tooth? See how it's supposed to have a chip from the records. You can see these marks here where they just put it into a clamp and took a file to it. I mean, the texture's all wrong. This was strictly amateur hour. And this filling that's supposed to be halfway through the dentin, I mean dangerously close to the pulp chamber in the center of the tooth, well in this recreation it's right through the enamel. This is shoddy enough work that it could qualify as a transformative creation inspired by the original. So where does that leave you?”
“With a dentist in my trunk,” he said, and my eyes got wide. He stepped out into the rain, and I had to follow him. We walked down the steps. He had a small blue car that looked like a Honda hatchback knock-off and could easily have belonged to anyone in country- at least anyone well off enough to own a car in the first place. “I went to him first, and he told me that the teeth belonged to Hoa Lo.” He put his keys into the trunk and opened it up, and seamlessly slipped into Vietnamese. “So why'd you lie to me?” The dentist's mouth was duct taped, as were his wrists. He threw the dentist over his shoulder like he weighed nothing at all, and started back towards my apartment. I was about to protest about conducting an interrogation in my room-
The dentist's brains exploded out a hole in his skull and splattered across my shirt and face. I started to gag, because a little of it had gotten in my mouth. The dentist dropped head-first onto the concrete, and I think his neck snapped. A big hand grabbed me and pulled me against the wall of the building beside my apartment complex, and he stared into me, and mouthed, “Stay here.”
I've never really been in combat. I know how to fire a weapon, and I've seen more than my fair share of corpses, but that was the first time I'd ever seen someone killed like that- certainly the first time I'd taken a brain bath. And I couldn't keep myself from staring at the dentist's corpse as the rest of his shattered gray matter fell out of his head like shit from a prolapsed colon.
I'd gotten to the part where I was wondering, maybe even fantasizing, about what it's like to have a bullet go through your brain, what that last part of a second is before the shock wave from the bullet destroys every mechanism in your brain needed to think about it, and I think I'd decided it would be like the worst headache possible mixed with a stabbing pain when a second-story window erupted above me in a shower of glass. The body of the shooter landed on the edge of a dumpster, bent over it unnaturally in the stomach, and I thought, wow, two corpses. And then the body arched as the shooter tried to breathe around several broken ribs- at least one, from the sound of it, poking a hole in his lung.
And suddenly the big hand was on my shoulder again, and I nearly soiled myself. “Your apartment's been compromised. We'll go to my hotel.” I followed him over to the shooter.
“Where are you staying?”
“The Hilton.”
“They built a Hilton in Hanoi?” I asked, incredulous. He gave a slight smile, then hefted the shooter onto his shoulder. He loaded them both into his trunk, the shooter beneath the dentist, and we got in and started to drive. It amazed me how normal the night suddenly felt. We might have as easily been two friends on the town, and for the first time it felt like I could see myself living here, that there was a side to the city I'd locked myself away from inside my room, and not just buildings, or a nightlife, but people.
Then we were at the hotel, and he opened the trunk, and the night returned to its former strangeness. He picked up the shooter, and I offered to hoist the dentist. “Leave him,” he said; “we'll dump them later.” My eyes caught the shooters at that, but strangely I reacted and he didn't.
He taped the shooter to a hotel room chair before he bothered saying a word. The shooter was older, and didn't even bother denying he'd been NVA by way of VC, or that he knew Hoa Lo back in the day, but then he clammed up. Then he heard that voice in his ear, “I spent time as a VC prisoner. Your kind taught me how to make you talk. So it's your call how much this hurts.”
After that we couldn't shut him up, but when we'd heard enough from the shooter, the Ghost produced a syringe. “Simple mercies,” and the shooter nodded his head, and closed his eyes as the needle pierced his neck, only barely winced as the plunger went in. We left.
As we were waiting for the service elevator he said, “Overdose of methadone. It's gentler than the way the dentist went, maybe better than he deserved.”
I couldn't stand one thing. “He was willing to risk his life, willing to kill, for his former commander, but he gave him up without any kind of a fight.”
He sighed before he spoke. “Every man has his breaking point. Days, weeks, sometimes years, he'd have told me what I wanted to know. He knew that- he's lived that.” He pushed in the elevator's emergency stop button, and a tiny bell rang. “You can stay here. Shooter'll go quiet. You can push him into the bathroom if you like.”
“Do you honestly think I'm safer here alone than with you?” I asked.
“Fair point,” he said, and pulled the button back out, and the elevator resumed its descent.
As the elevator hit the ground floor, something struck me. “You likely saved my life back at the apartment-”
“Though I likely endangered it to begin with,” he corrected me.
“Uh, no, my point is, what do I call you.”
“Jack'll do.” He put out his hand, and I shook it.
At his car he opened the door for me. “In the backseat, there's a box of files. The address he gave us belongs to one of the men I've been watching- I suspected him. He's a smuggler, drugs, women when he can get away with it. He has enough money and resources that, once he knows I'm this close, he can put an army between him and me- a proper one.
The only advantage I'm going to have is surprise- he likely won't expect me this soon.”
He crawled past me into the car. The back seats were hollowed out. In them he's got an old M16A1, and the other, he explains, “Is one of them new M16A4s, so you don't get lonesome for home. I didn't think things would shake this way, but I'm a man who cares to be prepared.” He's also got body armor in the trunk where the spare ought to be, and he hands me one he figures “Ought to fit;” I guess being prepared is how you wage a one-man war on what were to his era underground terrorist cells. I can't imagine that life, and even if I tried, I somehow think I'd whitewash and sugar-coat it, and do his experience no justice at all.
I squirm in the armor in my seat while he drives, trying to skim the file he pointed me at. Hoa Lo's idea of a nom de guerre is a mash-up of Vietnam's two most recent leaders, Nguyen Tan Luong. No wonder Jack had him flagged already. Underneath Lo's file is a service record for a Marine, marked KIA. “That's the one we're looking for,” he tells me. “I made sure I had dental records.” I flip to the page and sure enough, a very thorough history for Sergeant Robert Gordon.
I realize we're driving up an incline, and I look up, and on top of this hill there's only one house. Lo's home is big, with a ten-foot fence around the perimeter, and a