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The second stage of their mission was Recon. Intel reported Charlie was stockpiling firepower at a location near the village of Bu Von Kon. Blackjack was to locate the weapons cache and frag it, killing any and all VC between here and there.

One question: Where were the weapons?

“Answer,” Oddy said, once the Viet was secure. “Get on it.”

Randy “Answer” Blondeau was twenty years old, tall and gangly with a mess of carroty curls tamped beneath his helmet. He looked like any other grinning, inoffensive adolescent who might be found wandering college campuses in Anytown, USA. Looks can be deceiving: Answer was Blackjack’s interrogator, a post at which he exhibited a terrifying proficiency.

Answer knelt beside the wounded soldier. The Viet’s face held a simple geometry in profile, flat and sunken, faintly mongoloid. Mucous ran from his nostrils in webby strands, across his upper lip and down the sides of his mouth in a snotty Fu Manchu. The shock had him trembling like a Parkinson’s victim.

Answer whispered in his ear. The Viet shook his head.

Answer nodded slowly. Then, with equal slowness, he probed the index and pointer fingers of his left hand through the bloody hole in the soldier’s right pantleg, exploring the inner workings of the Viet’s shattered kneecap.

The VC’s neck tendons bulged out, hands seizing handfuls of dirt.

Answer’s fingers twitched inside the wound. He cocked his head to one side, as dogs sometimes do when curious or perplexed. The Viet thrashed, incapable of screaming, the pain a living, all-consuming entity.

Answer pulled his fingers free. They were red to the knuckles. He whispered into the soldier’s ear again. The soldier told him something. “He says the cache is southeast, Sarge,” Answer told Oddy. “Ten, twelve klicks.”

Crosshairs pointed his gun at the prisoner. “So what do we do with him?”

“For damn sure he’s never walking again,” Tripwire said.

Gunner said, “Call a med evac.”

“Med evac for a hobbled Gook?” Zippo said.

“Ever hear of a little something called the Geneva Convention, Zippo?”

“Tell that to the poor fucks Charlie’s got rotting in tiger cages.”

“Gunner’s right,” Oddy said. “The enemy poses no threat. Slash, get on the PRC and call in a—”

Before Oddy could finish the med evac order, Answer unsheathed a K-Bar knife and stabbed the VC soldier in the neck.

The man looked mildly bewildered, staring first at Answer and then somewhere beyond him, up into the sky, where a black raven circled. Answer pulled the knife out. Blood leapt from the wound, painting a thick red scar across his fatigue vest.

“Jesus!” Tripwire shrugged off his explosives bandoleer and knelt beside the VC soldier, who was gurgling like an infant, unable to scream or cry out because of the blood spurting from the slit in his neck. Tripwire pressed Kotex pads to the gash but it was futile: the blood pushed through his fingers in thick rivulets, and within seconds the pads were soaked. The soldier grabbed at Tripwire’s sleeves, fingers clenching and unclenching like a panicked infant’s. He burrowed his head into Tripwire’s stomach, mouth opening and closing, as though he wanted to eat his way inside, tunnel in where it was warm and safe to die.

Oddy knocked the knife from Answer’s hand. “The fuck you think you’re doing?” Gripping the scrawny interrogator’s shoulders, he slammed him up against a banana tree; the rough bark made dry scratchy noises, slicing Answer’s cheek. Oddy slapped his face once, twice, three times, forehand to backhand to forehand, the sound of black flesh on white flesh sharp as a starter pistol’s crack. “That’s
not
how we do things!”

Answer appraised his Sergeant through half-lidded eyes. Thin streams of blood leaked from the corners of his mouth and down his face. He turned and spat a tooth into the dirt. “This is a warzone, Sarge,” he said. “Different rules apply.”

Oddy yanked Answer forward until their noses nearly touched. “Not in this unit. Not under my roof.” Up close, Oddy was struck by the blueness of the young interrogator’s eyes, a color somehow devoid of pity.
Cold eyes
, he thought.
Cold, dead eyes
. He thrust Answer backwards with a mixture of anger, revulsion, and—the emotion rising quick and unbidden—fear. Answer stumbled gracelessly, tripping over an exposed root, falling on his ass in a puff of red dust.

“Do something like that again and we’ll have serious words, dogface.”

Zippo came over and knelt beside Answer. He lowered the muzzle of his flame-thrower until the pilot light’s flame touched the sole of Answer’s Bata combat boot.

“There’s fair and there’s fair,” he said as the pilot light burned into the boot’s rubberized sole, sending up tendrils of stinking black smoke. Answer did not move his foot. “That, my little friend, was not fair. We got to keep our heads, get me? Keep our heads, keep our shit hardwired, and maybe—just maybe—we get through this alive.”

By now the flame had melted through the sole. The smell of bubbling rubber was joined by another, thicker smell reminding Crosshairs of sweet pork barbecue. Answer stared up at Zippo with those cold blue eyes, face a mask of composure. Zippo raised the flamer’s muzzle with a look halfway between bafflement and grudging respect.

“As long as we’re on the same wavelength,” he said.

“I’m tuning in on your signal,” Answer said softly. He tore a strip off his fatigues and tied it around his injured foot.

Tripwire cradled the VC’s head as the man twitched through his death throes. The young man died quickly, quietly. Tripwire rolled the head off his lap and stood up. Low-hanging storm clouds moved over the horizon, blocking out the sun, etching the foothills in clean-edged darkness.

Oddy said, “Let’s get humping.”

— | — | —

Excerpted from the
Slave River Journal
,

April 9th, 1986:

THREE RESEARCHERS MISSING

IN NORTHWEST TERRITORIES

“No Physical Evidence Found as of Yet,”

— RCMP Spokesman Says

By Michael Fulton

Fort Simpson, NWT
: A three-member expedition team sent to observe and record caribou migratory patterns in the territory surrounding Great Bear Lake has gone missing. The crew (statistician Carl Rosenberg, cartographer Bill Myers, and Lillian Hapley, another statistician) took off from the Fort Good Hope airport on April 7th in a Cessna 340-S ultralight plane piloted by Rosenberg. Contract workers for the Department of Natural Resources, the trio were scheduled to fly a circuit over Great Bear Lake and outlying areas, recording the movement of the dwindling caribou herds. The last radio communication came at 2:30 p.m., when Hapley radioed the DNR home base to report no caribou sighted. Sid Grimes, Spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, issued a statement that a search-and-rescue team is currently combing the presumed crash area, but as yet, “No physical evidence has been located…”

— | — | —

II.

Slaughterhouse Five

(1987)

20 Years Later

Daniel “Zippo” Coles—Execution Poet

Vancouver, British Columbia.

November 30th, 1987. 12:05 p.m.

Picture this: you’re knee-deep in elephant grass, walking point somewhere between the Delta and the DMZ, and you can
smell
the fucking Gooks, smell their stink on the breeze, and fear crawls like fire ants at the back of your throat and you’re thinking,
I’m here to change things, make things better
, but all the while it’s you who’s changing, changing deep inside.

Soldiers deal with this change in different ways.

Me?

I lit the pilot light of an LPO-50 flame-thrower, 50,000 BTUs of Gook-cooking power, and laid down a scar of flame that’d turn a village full of militant Zipperheads into roving, raving, Roman-fucking-Candles in a New York minute.

Talk about your motherfucking catharsis.

Gritty noonday sunlight streams through a west-facing bay window to fall across white satin sheets. I rub sleep-crust from my eyes and stand, naked, to survey the dull vista. Rain falls in endless gray sheets over a horseshoe-shaped metropolis ringing Queen Charlotte Sound. Vancouver’s mayor, a huckstering blowhard in a ten-gallon cowboy hat, proclaims the city to be “The Florida of Canada,” on account of its lack of snow. The comparison is ridiculous, like proclaiming the seagull the “Bald Eagle of Canada.”

After showering and dressing I sit on the balcony, drinking a Carnation Instant Breakfast and reading the
Globe and Mail
. A story on page five incenses me: some of these new-wave fags are
trying
to contract AIDS. It seems there’s these homo-lifestyle magazines—
Turdburgling Today
or
Modern Man-Ramming
or I don’t know what the fuck—painting a rosy picture of the disease. You’ve got glossy photos of pillowbiters climbing mountains and hang-gliding, all of them thin on account of the AIDS cocktails giving them chronic diarrhea. So now the disease has become romanticized, the latest must-have accessory, and these fruits are falling all over themselves to catch it. There’s these clubs where AIDS-positive men—“gift-givers”—meet up with negs—“bug-chasers”—and then flounce off to shoot ass-darts, passing the disease.

Pisses me the fuck off.

You see, Canada’s got socialized medicine. So who do you think foots the bill for these butt-monkeys and their life-prolonging cocktails? That’s right: John Q. Public. Specifically, me. Mother
fuckers
. I mean, a bunch of ass-pirates want to off themselves, fine by me. Just have the common decency to ventilate your cranium with a .44 and spare us hard-working taxpayers the expense, huh?

The telephone rings. I answer on the third. “You got Coles.”

“Kawanami’s in from the airport.”

“Where?”

“Princess Gardens. Penthouse suite.”

“How much?”

“Fifty large for Kawanami, twenty anyone else.”

“Deal.”

What’s the value of a human life, bypassing the ethics of the question? Human flesh and innards are worthless, unless you happen to know a black market organ farmer or an unscrupulous Chinese chef. Bones can be ground into fertilizer but that’s a buck a pound max, so risk outweighs reward. You can sell a decent head of hair to a wig shop but there’d be questions and who wants that hassle? So basically, the human body is worth less than the most worn-out trail nag, which could still net a few bucks as dog food. Ergo, the value of a human life is less, monetarily-speaking, than an animal’s. And we slaughter animals by the millions
every day
.

Dig that logic, baby.

I work for Slopes, mostly. Vancouver’s lousy with them. They cross the Pacific from Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, nailing down stakes on the first patch of soil they wash up on. The city’s infested to the point that local wags have dubbed it “Chan-couver.” Didn’t take the Yakuza and Triads long to migrate. These dudes hold 3,000-year-old grudges against each other; a fellow with my abilities can make a very good living settling their age-old scores.