“Yeah, hey, thanks for the testimonial.” He was swaying now, hugging his hands under his armpits to save them from further damage. ’Anybody else?”

The new boots Stewart and Ram had run at the sight of Spoiler going up in a blaze of glory. Haskell was rolling from side to side, and the hatred glaring from his tiny eyes was answer enough. One by one, the others stepped forward to join Flash’s impromptu mutiny.

“Great,” he nodded. “It’s, it’s a gas-gas-gas. Uh, Slick, can you take over for a little while? Make like you’re Louie – Louie I gotta go now.”

Not comprehending, Slick nodded.

Suddenly Flash stood at the center of a small hurricane. Dirt and debris and even rain were drawn to him in a swirling cloud. When the miniature tornado cleared, Mark Meadows stood there, swaying. His face and hands were still shockingly blistered, as J. J. Flash’s had been.

“Long live the revolution,” he croaked, and pitched forward, unconscious, at Croyd Crenson’s splayed feet.

Part Three

Fixin’-to-Die Rag

Chapter Thirty-six

“Mark.”

Seated cross-legged on the mat-covered floor, Mark looked up. Lou Inmon’s great feathered head was stuck in the door.

“We got company,” Osprey said. “Could be bad.”

Mark’s veins got cold. Not for the first time he wished that Croyd were up and around, rather than out cold and being lugged around as baggage by the mutineers. Exactly what a giant lizard could do to help if they’d been discovered was a bit problematical. But at least Mark wouldn’t feel so isolated, so alone.

“Government troops?” he asked. It had been a constant high-wire dance, in the weeks since the breakaway, trying to keep his little band accessible to the steady stream of deserters from Venceremos without exposing them to the People’s Army or the wrath of Sobel’s diehard loyalists.

Osprey shook his head. “’Yards. They just appeared.

Put the villagers seriously uptight.”

A thin, middle-aged Vietnamese slid into the hootch, keeping as far away from Osprey as possible – after initial wariness the villagers were beginning to see their joker guests as benevolent monsters, but monsters nonetheless.

“Mock,” the villager said. “Will Dark Lady appear? Will Dark Lady help us? All moi number ten, steal our women, eat our dogs.”

Mark sighed. Moi meant savages. Ethnic Vietnamese treated the Montagnards as animals – pests. I thought racism and intolerance were white-European-male kind of things, Mark thought wearily. He had been learning differently.

“You shouldn’t call them that, Thich. They’re people too.”

Thich looked skeptical. “Them steal. Dark Lady come?”

Mark stood up. “If she’s needed, she’ll come.” Thich bobbed his head and pulled back. Mark went to the door.

There were half a dozen of them, squatting in the middle of the village with carbines and shotguns across their thighs, smoking in the heavy evening sun angling in between mountain peaks and slate sky. Like most Vietnamese Mark had seen, they were small and seemed to have been wound out of wire on human-shaped armatures. Two wore turbans, and all had on wire bracelets and blankets with holes in them for their heads like scrapes.

He spared them only a glance. The man with the bandaged left hand who stood in the middle of them was tall only by comparison with the Vietnamese, but he attracted Mark’s attention like a giant electromagnet.

Mark’s hand jumped toward a pocket of his cammie blouse. Then he sighed, and his hand dropped away.

“Mr. Bullock,” he said, “you’re one persistent guy.”

“Last time I saw you, you were helping those DEA agents track me down,” Mark said, dipping up hot rice with his fingers. “Why should I treat you like a friend, Mr. Bullock? Er, Belew.”

J. Robert Belew looked up. The glow from the fish-oil lamp under-lit his eyebrows and gave his features a Satanic cast. “What if I said I didn’t walk in here without taking, shall we say, measures to ensure my safety?”

“I’d say you were full of shit, man. We’re in the middle of a whole lot of my friends, and I don’t just mean aces. If you’re planning to make any moves, you better have brought the People’s Army to back you up. And even if you did, they’d never get here in time to keep you from being slagged.”

“Threats, Doctor? That doesn’t sound like the gentle Captain Trips of old.”

Mark hunched a one-shoulder shrug. “I don’t put up with as much abuse as I used to.”

Belew laughed. “I came in here with six underfed Montagnards with about twelve rounds of ammunition among them. If I don’t walk out alive, not one blessed thing will happen, except my aged mother will be very sad in a dignified and well-bred way. If not exactly surprised.”

He set his own bowl aside. “Satisfied? Or do we need to go through more macho posturing?”

“I’m not posturing, man. I’m making my position clear.”

“Very well, Dr. Meadows. Let me make my own a little clearer: if I’m not your friend, why did the DEA agents never actually catch you?”

“I had a little bit to do with that. And my friends, yeah. But to tell you the truth – I know they’re like the big heroes and everything back in the States, but I never thought narcs were all that bright.”

Belew laughed. “You should’ve seen these two. Heckle and Jeckle.”

“So where are they now?”

“Playing drop the soap for the Turkish national ace in some awful slam in Istanbul.”

“You’re putting me on.”

Belew solemnly shook his head. “I set them up. They never suspected a blessed thing until the Turks found the coke in their luggage. And all the while they thought they were putting one over on me.” He paused to chuckle. “Naturally the United States and the Governor will get them out of it. Eventually.”

Mark laughed long and loud. When he was finished, he shook his head. “I know I should feel sorry for them. But they tried to kill me, they hurt a lot of innocent people, and they endangered a whole lot more. The heck with them.”

“Indeed.”

“Why’d you do it? Why were you trying to help me?”

“May I speak frankly with you, Doctor?”

Mark gave him the Big Doubt eye, one eyelid at half-mast, the opposite brow arched Mr. Spock style. “Why do I have the feeling you’re going to do anything but? But go for it, man.”

It was Belew’s turn to laugh. “I like your style, Dr. Meadows. I thought you were just another naпve hippie burnout. But you’ve got something to you. Some steel in your spine.”

“I’d rather you think of me as a hippie, if it’s all the same.”

Belew showed him a raised eyebrow back. “A hippie, in command of a hundred armed men and getting set to take on the whole Republic of Vietnam?”

“So call me a combat hippie. This isn’t exactly the role I ever had in mind. But you were about to be frank, Mr. Belew”

“Never give me a straight line like that, Doctor. But yes. With all due respect, my helping didn’t actually have much to do with you personally. It was more to put a spike in the wheels of the people who were after you.”

“You got something against the DEA? Uh, you want a beer?” He held up a couple of bottles of Giai Phong with the necks between his fingers.

“No thanks. I’m trying to cut down on formaldehyde. No, I don’t have anything against Drug Enforcement; I’ve done contract work for them. That’s a career option I have a sneaking suspicion is going to be closed from here on in.

“I have something against the people they were fronting for.”

Mark stopped with his beer halfway to his lips. “You going to give me a line about some kind of big conspiracy behind the U.S. government?”