“What aces?” Belew asked softly.

Brewer shook his head. “They hadn’t actually showed. They were all a big secret. Somehow I wasn’t interested in hanging around to see who they were. I went over the wire that night.”

The words Brewer released into the room overrode the ones tumbling around in Mark’s head. Thankfully.

“There was nothing else for me to do. Maybe I’m a coward, man. But there wasn’t anything left to fight for there. Nothing I could understand. I could stay there and die, and it would all be for nothing. I thought I was ready to die for la causa, you know, for la lucha. But not… for nothing.

“They chased me. One of the boys, joker-ace, used to run with the Geeks, he could smell the way a bloodhound could. Maybe you remember him. Little guy, and his face was all sad eyes and these humongous nostrils.”

Mark nodded. “Madison.”

“Yeah. After he hit camp, he started calling himself that instead of his joker name, Sniffer. I talked him out of that; I was real concerned about his dignity.

“They set him after me. He found me in an abandoned village next to a derelict sugar plantation. You maybe know the one? We went through it on patrols a lot, before moving up into the Highlands. It wasn’t abandoned then. The rebels, they – you – are right up against the wire at Venceremos every night now. They ran off the overseers, and the villagers fled. They wanted to get away from us. Made me sick when I heard about it. But that was before I had to run away.

“I killed him. I shed joker blood.” He held up the claw. “He was all over me, trying to strangle me, yelling that he’d found me. I jabbed this into his eyes and pushed as hard as I could. I pushed for all I was fucking worth. He screamed and struggled and flopped around, and then suddenly he was still. I had to break the end off my claw to get out of there.”

He put his face into his flesh palm. “I went into the sugar cane. It’s all dry and overgrown. I heard them thrashing around, coming after me. Then somebody started letting loose with flamethrowers. I don’t know if it was the Brigade or the People’s Army. Some of the boys got caught; I heard them screaming, worse than anything I’ve ever heard. Worse than Luce – he was too screwed up to scream very loud, even when he was conscious.”

He held up both his hands. “I got away. I hid in the woods. Eventually some of your bandits – your rebels – found me. I thought they were going to kill me. But they put me on a truck and brought me here.”

“We still get deserters out of Fort Venceremos,” Mark said. “The locals know to be on the lookout for them.”

Brewer sat with his head tilted, looking as if he had something more to say. Tears dripped from his face. Belew looked at Mark. Mark shook his head.

They rose and went out into the open-hearth heat of afternoon. “Sounds like your hero Colonel Sobel’s just about departed controlled flight,” Belew said, with unaccustomed nastiness.

Mark felt too hollow to flare back at him. “He’s a good man,” he said dully.

“Yes, he is,” Belew said. “And so what? A lot of good men have done a lot of harm, over the years.”

“I suppose you’d rather be a bad man,” Mark snapped, finally rising to it.

“Well, you recall what Mark Twain said about Hell: it’s where all the interesting people will go. I’d hate to miss out on good conversation in the afterlife.”

“Hey! Hello!”

Belew and Mark looked in different directions and at each other. Then, as one, they looked up. Mark felt as if he was part of a bad television skit.

Croyd was hovering thirty feet in the air. He waved.

“I just found out I can do this,” he said airily. “Whoops!”

He tipped forward in slow motion, hitting about a sixty-degree angle before he stabilized.

“Sorry” he called. “Still having a little trouble with my vertical hold. Or would you call it trim?”

Chapter Forty-five

“No way,” Belew told the Revolutionary Oversight Council.

It was an L-shaped cinderblock building, blocky and overgrown, off in the woods not far from the clearing in which Croyd had been experimenting to see what powers he had awakened with. Nothing remained by way of furnishings – the long collapsible table and the auditorium chairs were formerly the property of the nearby village’s executive committee, its governing apparatus, whose members had sensibly made themselves scarce or jumped to the rebellion. Still, Mark was convinced it was an American-built school. It just had that familiar feel to it.

And while the French and the communists both had their more than somewhat slightly conspicuous failings, who but Americans would have thought to build a flat-roofed building in rain-soaked Vietnam?

Young Nguyen of the trai cai tao faction gave Belew the fish eye. Dong, the dapper gangster, showed no emotion, but telltale sweat domes popped out along his hairline.

“I don’t mean any disrespect to our representatives from Saigon,” Belew went on. “I simply do not believe it is in the interests of the rebellion to commit the bulk of its forces to a defense of Saigon at this time. We have the advantage of dispersal of forces, the will-o’-the-wisp’s upper hand. The government has many targets and cannot possibly strike them all. If we concentrate in Saigon, they’ll have just one.”

In the place of honor at the other end of the table – directly opposite Belew – Mark swallowed. He’s got a point. He made himself stand straight.

“You could be passing up a very fine opportunity, my friend,” Dong said, in that head-back, hissing way of his. His mannerisms made Mark think of a Vietnamese William Buckley. “Our nation’s rightful capital has taken up arms in support of the rebellion. The mayor, Vo Van Kiet, is ready to declare for us.”

“The soldiers in Saigon are expelling their officers,” Nguyen Cao Tri said breathlessly. “They’ve called on Moonchild to come and lead them. This is what we’ve all been waiting for.”

“A massive popular rising was what Vo Nguyen Giap was always waiting for too,” Belew said. “He never did get it. And the times he judged the time was ripe and gambled on getting it, like Tet ’68, he lost his shirt. Even if the world media did turn it into a victory for him, after the fact.”

“But we already have a revolt,” Mark pointed out.

Belew shrugged. “The Saigon mob is fickle. Mobs are, everywhere. But the Saigon mob is worse. You can relax, by the way, Dong,” he added with a cool grin. “I mean ’mob’ in the sense of the rabble in the streets, not your people.”

That did not much seem to mollify the crime boss, though he was too cool to show his agitation in any very overt way. Several of the other Saigon representatives were shouting and jumping up and down. Ernie had to wedge himself between Nguyen Cao Tri and the equally tough, equally young, and equally hotheaded Ngo An Dong to head off an incipient fistfight. A Southerner himself, the Cao Dai leader obviously had little love for the big-city boys.

“Gentlemen!” Mark rapped, hardly even remembering to be abashed at raising his voice. “Are we here to fight the government, or are we here to pound on each other while our enemies recover their strength and laugh at us?”

Silence bit like a guillotine blade. Shamefaced, Ngo and Nguyen stepped away from each other, avoiding one another’s eyes and those of Mark, who stood at the table’s head, stern and looming as a teacher confronting unruly third-graders. They forgot to take umbrage at the fact a dirty moi had laid hands upon them. Or maybe they understood by now that a display of racism would get the inhumanly tall American really pissed off.

Mark stood there, blinking, briefly at sea. The council-table commotion had bumped him off balance, as it always did. Mark always thought of Asians as reserved, polite. Generally they were, in his experience. But if something got them going, they earned on like a cageful of jays. Not the kind he used to smoke either.