The two surviving gunmen were joined by their three brethren. Two of them dodged back up to the street to run after Belew in futile pursuit. The rest got into a good old-fashioned shouting match, waving their rifles under each other’s noses.

Suddenly one pointed at the receding boat. Belew was aiming a fat black tube at them, something that looked highly reminiscent of a grenade launcher.

One dove off the wharf into the Ben Nghe. The rest scattered.

“‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth,’” J. Bob Belew said, and unscrewed the telephoto lens from his camera. I can sell those pictures to Rolling Stone, he thought, or Soldier of Fortune, depending. He was on the masthead of both publications as contributing editor. The superior man thought of righteousness before gain, but what the hell?

Running the gauntlet of fire had been a final act of calculated ballsiness. That hit squad would be damned sure he was heading down to the Delta.

But he wasn’t. Out of their sight, he was going to cut left at the Te and then again on the Saigon. North, toward where that Ozzie soak at Rick’s had told him Fort Venceremos was.

He laughed out loud. He never gambled for money; he thought that was a waste. But he loved to stake his life and win.

Chapter Twenty-six

“Village is deserted, Sarge,” Mario called back from the point, leading the squad out of the rice fields. He was a slight, intense kid with a Rambo rag tied around his temples. His skin was covered with pebble-like protrusions, which gave rise to the name Mark had briefly known him by back on the Rox, Rocky.

The sergeant stopped. Still strung out single file after coming off a paddy dike, the squad did an inchworm thing behind him.

“Is it, now?” Mario was shifty and smart and had seen some combat during the nightmare siege of Bloat’s stronghold. The sergeant thought he had potential to be a good troop, which was why he’d put him in the crucial – and, in an actual wartime situation, highly dangerous – point position.

The sergeant pointed at a pen where a heavy-horned water buffalo with a calf nuzzling her side eyed them with deep suspicion. “Think they’d leave their animals behind?”

He started walking again. Mario stood there slumped, with the consciousness of having fucked up just beating off him like heat off sun-warmed blacktop.

“Mario, my man. Walk with me.” The sergeant put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and urged him along into the village. He didn’t go by “Rocky” anymore; he had fallen under the influence of Lucius Gilbert, otherwise known as Luce, who held that joker names were bogus-slave names.

Moving with egg-walking care, Mark followed along with the others. Mark felt dumb; he’d thought the village was deserted too. He hadn’t noticed anything but these funky bamboo hootches, like he’d grown up seeing on the six o’clock news. They gave him a sense of dйjа vu.

“Maybe they’re off working the paddies,” suggested Slick.

“With a big old pot of rice bubbling on the fire out front of one of their hootches like that?” the sergeant asked, pointing again.

The hair started to rise on the back of Mark’s neck. Where are they? Are they watching us? He felt like a trespasser.

“There!” Eraserhead screamed, so shrilly it made everybody jump. He flung out a hand to point, so fast his arm stretched to half again its normal length. “I saw somebody there in that hut!”

Mark snapped his head back and forth as if watching a tennis match on speed – him or the players, it didn’t make much difference. Yes, he saw them. Faces in the shadows. Some sullen, some openly hostile. Most of them wore a blank resignation he imagined a rape victim got when she knew she couldn’t fight back.

“Why are they doing this?” Spoiler demanded in a high-pitched voice. “Why the hick are they hiding from us?”

“They’re afraid of us,” the sergeant said. “They think we’re monsters – even Meadows, who looks about two feet taller’n any human they ever seen before. Also, we got these.”

He slapped the receiver of the M-16 he, like the rest of them, had been issued that morning. They were the reason Mark was being so hypercautious. He was afraid the thing would go off by itself.

The sergeant chuckled. “Got no way of knowing we got no bullets.”

“But we’re here to help them!” Mario said.

The sergeant gave him a look. “They heard that one before, son.”

Croyd tipped back his bottle of Giai Phong. He and mark, whose squad had been stood down after coming in a little after noon, sat on lawn chairs in front of their bunker. The afternoon sun lit up bubbles the color of Croyd’s eyes.

“As far as I know,” he said regretfully, “I got no ace powers this time around.” He gave a half-lidded glare to a bunch of jokers drifting their way in evident hope of cadging beer. “Not that I’ve been in any hurry to let these shrabs know that.”

“You really dig life as a gecko, man?” asked Mark. He wore a T-shirt tied turban-fashion around his head and nothing on his chest. He wasn’t worried about ultraviolet radiation at the moment. He was worried about hot.

“Skink, dammit. I’m a skink.”

“I thought skinks were skinny, squinty lizards with heads smaller than their necks.”

Croyd drew himself up in his chair. At Mark’s suggestion he had discovered that he could sit in a lawn chair if he fed his tail through the back.

“See the words you’re using?” he asked. “Skinny. Squinty. ‘Sk’ words. They sound like ‘skink.’ That’s why you associate them with skinks.”

Mark looked mulish. “I don’t know, man.”

“Look, who’s the authority here? You – all right, you’re a biochemist. But I – I’m a skink. So there.”

He had an audience for his outburst. “Naw,” said one of the old breed, a three-eyed joker Brigade vet everybody called Tabasco. “You’re a fuck-you lizard.”

“Okay,” Croyd said. “Fuck you.” He lunged at the joker, opening his mouth wide. It was shocking red inside and armed with alarming teeth. Tabasco squawked and ran, pelted by the jeers of his buddies.

“You fools wouldn’t know a skink if it bit you on the ass,” Croyd grumbled. He settled back and resumed his beer.

“Uh-oh,” he said at once. “Now what?”

For the last ten or fifteen minutes there had been a lot of activity around the wooden headquarters buildings in the center of camp. Now the tall figure of Evan Brewer – Brew – was striding across the parade ground toward Croyd’s bunker.

Tabasco was standing on the far side of the group of idlers from Croyd, batting at his buddies’ hands as they poked at him. His hand hit something hard and spiky. He stopped and turned to see Brew with the end of his lobster-claw resting on his shoulder.

“You. Down to the quartermaster. Do it now. And you, and you.” He was picking out men from the original Brigade.

He stopped in front of Mark, reached out his claw to touch Mark on the sternum. The spiny tip was strangely cool as it pricked Mark’s bare skin.

“You too,” Brew said. “The Colonel wants an ace along. Though I don’t exactly know how your friends will find you to help you if something comes down.”

Even a half day on patrol had left Mark drained. But he struggled to make himself rise. “What’s happening, man?” he asked.

Brew’s handsome face clouded. “Somebody just took a couple of shots at one of our training patrols.”

“The bastards! The nat fuckin’ sons of bitches!”

The sun had vanished into a cloud tsunami rolling in across the South China Sea. Rays of pale light fanned out from the place where it had vanished like the fingers of a cosmic hand. Ambling back from the mess hall – he went along to chow to be comradely and also because there were sometimes big snaggletooth bamboo rats to be found – Croyd gestured toward the rec hall with his cigar.