Unspeakable, p.27
Unspeakable, page 27
The pink kimono was the closest thing she had to home, and so she had been wearing its comfort when Kate rushed into the bungalow Jerry had returned her to deep in the night.
Still wearing the kimono, Isabelle continued clicking away at the helipad where quiet pandemonium reigned. She had been in war zones, had colleagues abducted, seen men killed in action and come close to joining them. But never had she experienced such a rush of relief riding the back of raw fear as chopper blades sounded in the distance and Jerry emerged with a familiar figure in Ray Bans, boots, and a lab coat from the main facility.
Jerry was pushing a wheelchair. A man’s slack body, dressed in black pajamas, was strapped into the chair with an IV bag hooked above it. Other than a patch of sandy hair at the top, he resembled a mummy with surgical gauze wrapped around his head, nothing showing other than slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth.
She automatically adjusted the lens to capture their fast approach but when The Ambassador stopped his authoritative shouting to the assemblage, and she thought she heard the hiss of an expletive, she cautiously swept her camera skyward to capture first sight of the chopper, then returned her focus to the man clearly in charge, who now had his eyes on her.
Click. Click. She gave The Ambassador a thumbs up—let him know he looked good—and made sure she didn’t snap anything or anyone that could be construed as a threat to the image he clearly wanted to project.
This was not the time to be reckless. This was the chance to get out alive and onto a Navy vessel, along with the backpack that carried her life—a generous concession considering no one else was allowed to bring so much as a toothbrush. Then again, the pack also carried all the innocuous photos she hadn’t been able to develop or wire out due to their emergency evacuation.
While all heads pivoted skyward to their means of narrow escape there was no mistaking the Boom! Boom! of heavy artillery coming their way.
Just as the helicopter began its loud descent, Jerry parked the mummy next to Miles, and came to her, wrapped her in what appeared to be a fierce hug.
“Plans have changed,” he said in her ear with noise blasting the air all around them. “I’ve been given orders to stay behind to destroy evidence. I won’t be there to watch out for you, so you keep your head down. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything to call attention to yourself. Don’t ask any questions. Just give him what he wants and watch your back.”
And then he kissed her. It was only her forehead but she felt as if years were condensed into that last, momentary connection that she was both hungry for and repelled by. But it was the squint of Mile’s attention, making her feel like a butterfly, with wings spread and pinned alive into a scientific display, that caused her to shiver when Jerry extended the music cassette she didn’t think she could ever listen to again.
Everything happened so quickly then: The chopper’s ramp opening, The Ambassador making a show of getting Kate on first, then gesturing for Miles to take what appeared to be an unexpected addition—“one of the guards, injured last night”—followed by assorted personnel before Jordan insisted, “Isabelle, quick get on and Jerry, you join her, and…I will stay behind, we’ve hit maximum occupancy!” as if he were the proverbial captain going down with the ship.
“Sir, I ask permission to stay,” Jerry shouted above the bleating blades while the pilot, flying solo, frantically gestured to lift off. “I consider it my duty and an honor. Sir!”
Jerry’s sharp salute was met with what appeared to be a moment’s hesitation before The Ambassador saluted him back, and Jerry took off at top speed in the direction Isabelle thought the artillery fire had come from.
The door still open, the chopper immediately began to lift, seeming to struggle with the weight of capacity as it very slowly, incrementally rose higher, higher…
A cheer went up on board but Isabelle hardly registered it, her attention riveted on Jerry’s racing form cutting in and out on a partially obscured path below, moving so fast he looked more cheetah than human while she wrestled with too many emotions to sort. Click click. Click click.
And on she clicked as they continued to lift, skirting over treetops that gave way to a partial clearing with what might have been…cages? She thought she saw hands or arms sticking out of bamboo at the top and sides; thought she saw Jerry reach the outskirts, pointing a rifle.
The hair on her nape turned electric. Some instinct made her pause, glance over where Miles was stationed, standing about five feet away with the mummy parked to one side, and the backpack Jerry had pitched in for her, open at Miles’s feet.
Kate was staring at the mummy, shaking its arm, and shouting what sounded like, “Gregg? GREGG?” while her husband was suddenly trying to calm her down, and at that point Miles appeared to be lifting something out of Isabelle’s backpack—
A canister of film, large enough for a movie reel.
“Look! Look!” he shouted above Kate, “I told you she couldn’t be trusted!”
As if in slow motion Isabelle saw the mute faces of the ISIC personnel look away.
Click.
She saw The Ambassador’s attention move from the canister to settle coldly on her face.
Click.
Kate had stopped shaking the mummy to press a fist to her chest, lower her beautiful head.
Click.
And as Miles stepped forward, looking like he meant to grab her, Isabelle felt him give her a discreet push instead. For a moment she was enveloped by the sensation of hanging suspended in air. And then she was falling, falling backwards, in a freefall as stunning as Saigon’s while Miles smiled down as she plummeted.
CLICK.
CHAPTER 28
“Get out! Get out!” Jerry shouted, flinging open the door to Izzy’s cage, then jamming a key into the iron cuff that kept him dangling by one wrist.
He didn’t wait to see if Izzy managed to pick himself off the bottom and crawl out before firing at the locks of the cages he raced past until he blasted the lock off JD’s cage door.
Working at a blurring speed, he released JD’s shackled wrists, stretched from side to side. He was about to assist with the remaining iron restraints that ran from midsection to feet, when the NVA announced their breach of the compound with another explosive BOOM! BOOM!
Jerry looked up, expecting to see tanks rolling in, only for his mouth to open in a huge O of horror as something—a small body in pink—sailed out of the chopper.
“NOOOOO!”
He dropped the keys at JD’s feet while his own legs turned into pistons, his nearly superhuman body pushing past all previous limits. Surgically enhanced vision registered peripheral streaks of green while all he could see were his arms wide open to catch what had to be Isabelle falling from the sky…
He arrived just in time to see her go splat.
The primal, mournful cry that ripped from his lungs began with his first wild leap into wet, verdant green and did not stop until he fell to his knees in the middle of the rice paddy where Isabelle floated on black paddy water, a lotus wrapped in a pink kimono with long silky hair and arms splayed out, sooty lashes fanned shut.
Ever so carefully he scooped her up. She was so still in his arms, her beloved camera lying like a rosary around her neck.
She couldn’t possibly have survived the impact, but…
Both neck and camera appeared to be intact.
Her body looked to be just as miraculously unbroken, but…
Internal ruptures and injuries were far more fatal than fractured bones and—
He thought he felt her twitch.
Jerry learned how to pray on the spot.
Loping as fast as possible in the direction of squalor it had been his duty to oversee, and ultimately, to obliterate, he thought of The Ambassador’s final order:
Kill them all, including JD.
He had blatantly defied the direct order of his superior’s superior. And he wasn’t through defying orders yet.
Use every short range rocket, every grenade, every sparkler from the last Fourth of July if necessary to incinerate the entire compound. Keep a single jeep for yourself but destroy the rest. You know where to find us. A handsome reward will await.
Indeed, he did know where to find them. As for a handsome reward, all he could ever ask for was the life of the woman who had trusted him when she had every reason not to.
Reaching the edge of the rice paddy field, Jerry laid her down, did the whole desperate CPR procedure with water gushing from her lungs and out of her mouth, but even after a cough, two, her eyes were closed, breathing labored.
There was a surgical facility he had no intention of torching and a New York doctor he’d just released from a cage, a top notch surgeon in need of some serious care himself.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
And then there was that.
Holding Isabelle close, Jerry returned the way he had come, all the way chanting:
Izzy can fix you…Izzy can fix you…Izzy can fix you…
Izzy wondered if he was hallucinating. He thought he had been hallucinating for some time, where days no longer counted and nights bled into sounds and sensations that were either distorted nightmares, or something much worse: Real. Guards that hit him in the back, in the head, in the stomach with sticks and rifle butts, then retreating at the “Stand down!” order of the man who had brought him there, the Ghost Soldier known as Jerry Prince who poured precious water down his parched throat, slid food through the bars and into his mouth, and even occasionally let him out to relieve himself so he didn’t have to crouch in his own bodily waste…
Or maybe he had hallucinated all of that, too. Just as he must be in some kind of delirium, imagining his cage door was open, his numb hand attached to a raw, bleeding wrist was no longer shackled, and the command to “Get out! Get out!” was replaced by a different voice, JD’s voice, urging, “Izzy, Izzy, c’mon, bro, wake the fuck up!” while he thought he felt his cheek being lightly smacked and JD’s haggard face blended with the palm trees shifting in a slight breeze above him, making that sound like rain, while blue slits of sky played hide and seek with puffy white clouds that were making loud sounds, like farts. No… like artillery.
“Zhang, help me get him up!”
Zhang yelled something back about helping “Bao” who may have been the next voice, weakly responding in Vietnamese, then broken by the frantic shout:
“I’ve got her, I’ve got her! Isabelle’s hurt and needs Izzy’s help—”
A thunderous roll shook the ground, so visceral that Izzy wondered if maybe he wasn’t hallucinating the lumbering tank plowing into their midst with an NVA flag flying out of the top, its commander perched like a hood ornament out of the center and shouting, “BAO! BAO!” while the tank’s big gun veered to point directly at Jerry Prince, who dropped to the ground and protectively covered a splotch of pink.
It all seemed too real to pass off as a hallucination, and yet so surreal that they all could have been 3-D figures spun into a diorama, or actors trapped into a movie scene, reminding him of a darkened smoky theatre that smelled like popcorn and tasted like Good N Plentys, where he was a boy transported by wagon trains, mesquite campfires, and dusty trails, and the good guys always won. Only now, instead of horses and 6-shooters, the “bad guys” had a tank and several AK-47s trained on the rest of them—and, really, as far as “good guys” went, he would have to be delusional to believe he could ever qualify as being one again.
CHAPTER 29
Fish Sauce had dared to imagine many great things, but even he was stunned by all that had happened in no more than a blink:
Being one of the first to roll into the Tan Son Nhut airbase to lend fire power and clip the last wings of the invaders, while the capitol of Saigon found itself surrounded with no way out but rooftops and makeshift landing pads. So swiftly had the city dissolved into chaos, he had moved ahead on his mission, full of confidence that Saigon’s fate was sealed, and all too aware that his initial orders—to race ahead to the ISIC death camp and recover any prisoners, capture the war criminals, and retrieve documentation of the CIA’s monstrous experiments for leverage against the all-powerful US—had shifted with the light speed capitulation of an entire country that had shocked the conquerors as much as those being conquered.
Which meant he was arriving late instead of early and full of terror that if Bao still lived, retribution would be swift before his captors fled themselves.
Remembering how he had beat his chest, like Tarzan, and let out a blood-curdling yell of Chiến thắng! Chiến thắng! just last month upon proclaiming victory in the Central Highlands, Fish Sauce told himself anything was possible. And so he’d held on to hope as they approached the wall of the compound his superior had called “Trường giết người,” and taken charge as the consummate warrior riding his steel horse, commanding “FIRE! FIRE!” from the 85mm main gun until the Flying Pig plunged past the final barrier and into the Yankee death camp known as The Killing School.
He had imagined killing every remaining Yankee, their last cries owed to an excruciating death he would exact for any harm done to Bao. But that imagining did not include his own racing heart plummeting at the sight of the American helicopter making its escape overhead.
Nor had he imagined that after all the agony of wondering what his brother was going through, surely worse than the whispered conditions at Hoa Lo Prison, what the American POWs had dubbed The Hanoi Hilton, that the Flying Pig’s destination would end here:
In a small town center with pleasant cottages, a tennis court, tidy gardens, various buildings wearing white stucco and red tiled roofs that looked to belong more to an exclusive campus, the sort that Isabelle had been sent to, than the darker than dark Killing School.
It was eerie, like a ghost town, no white flags or guns firing out of the windows. Except for them, the grounds, the buildings, everything seemed deserted, abandoned. But he knew how the VC worked. All would appear to be deserted when the French, and then the US GI’s would sometimes come to actually help the villagers; many other times to torch humble homes, rape the women, kill the men who may, or may not be, secretly working for the North, just like him:
Fish Sauce. A boy of humble beginnings on a plantation near Nha Trang where his mother was a servant to a wealthy French/Vietnamese family that while, overall kind, would be answering to the likes of him now.
Surveying their surroundings with wary eyes, Fish Sauce ordered a round of machine gun fire into the closest bungalow.
No response. Except, what had he just heard in the distance, coming from the opposite direction they had plowed through?
There it was again. Gunfire.
And where there was gunfire, there was either an ally, an enemy, or even possibly Bao being shot while they wasted precious time ripping holes into an empty building.
Shouting directional orders to Chopsticks and the rest of his crew, Fish Sauce remained at his post, surveying all that they passed at top speed, AK-47 positioned on his shoulder and ready to fire at anything or anyone whose eyes or skin did not match his own.
They came to a plantation, a beautiful French masterpiece surrounded by exquisite gardens reminiscent of where his mother had served and Isabelle had befriended him and Bao, and for that reason alone he did not unload the 600 rounds in a minute the AK 47 was capable of delivering. Besides, except for a black kitten perched on the veranda’s banister and licking its paws, there were no other signs of life.
The gunfire he’d been following ceased. Fish Sauce was urgently scanning for a trail when he heard a man’s excruciating cry.
“That way!” he called to Chopsticks, helming the tank’s controls, while Porkrib stood on ready with the big gun and Noodlesoup stroked his own AK-47, poised to spring into action.
They tore up the beautiful garden with tread prints, uprooting everything in their path and shattering an old fountain that showered them with water. They didn’t bother opening the large gate on a stucco garden wall but blew it out with streaking tracer rounds that revealed a trail just wide enough for a jeep.
Clearly designed to remain as hidden as possible, they rammed the Flying Pig through dense jungle green on either side while Fish Sauce’s gaze darted in every direction, his heart pounding hard, then harder still when an opening came into sight.
As they burst into the clearing, Fish Sauce rapidly assessed the immediate area: It stank of death, disease, and human waste. A number of concrete cages, each made to hold 5 or 6 prisoners, were partially built into trenches with bars on top. They appeared to be empty.
But there had to be 20 much smaller bamboo cages, made for an animal the size of a tiger, with gates flapping open to reveal wretched looking prisoners crawling out of several, while what had to be a Yankee was being tended by another prisoner in tattered clothes who did not look Asian either, and near to them was a fierce looking man, much larger than most native countrymen, with another man in his arms, as if he had just pulled out—
“BAO! BAO!” Scrambling from the tank, Fish Sauce barely noticed the blonde man in a US military uniform hunched over something on the ground.
Racing past him while his crew piled out with their weapons, Fish Sauce ran to his twin brother, fell to his knees.
“Liem,” Bao weakly greeted him, appearing so frail that Fish Sauce was afraid he might break if he held him as tight as he longed to.
The fierce looking man who had given Bao up said in Vietnamese, “You are Liem, Bao’s brother. He said you would come even if you had to fight dragons to save him—as I would my brother. That is him. His name is JD.” He gestured to the one who did not look like him at all, who continued to examine the Yankee.
Chopsticks was fast approaching, aiming his AK-47 at the one named JD and the Yankee. Sensing the brother who had spoken was about to intervene, Fish Sauce held up his hand before more blood was spilled than was already evident on the grounds surrounding them.
