Maybe it’s because I’m getting sick. Sicker. I can feel the bugs poking out from their cocoons in my elbows and knees, ready to start their march up and down my arms and legs, fester in my lower back, spit poison into my stomach. I didn’t fix enough before I left, and didn’t bring enough with me for the long term. Just whatever I had in my pocket, which put me in ration mode, because someone or something had set fire to the cave. I watched from the street as it burned, catching the other buildings next to it, which went up like the cheap props they were. Paper-thin structures built only for the illusion of house and home. People all around me ran and screamed and ran and screamed. It looked like a napalm dance, back in the day. Running and screaming, holding hands to heads, eyes wide, mouths wider. I might have set the fire. I might have. The River might have, too. Shrines on parade, tiny torches in the paws of ceramic cats. I can’t remember, but my hands did smell like gasoline, but they always smelled like something that could burn.
That’s all behind me now. A five-year yesterday back in Bangkok, the city that collected me from the drain as I sluiced down the trough, picking me up to wait out a sentence of terror and sleepless nights, shot up with chemicals to keep a cosmic hound from coming to steal my air and kill me and take me away to the void. I wonder if Black Shuck was inside, waiting for me, when the first licks of flame carved through the walls, destroying its favorite doghouse where the wall met the ceiling.
I vomit on the steel floor of the chopper. The pilot doesn’t turn around, nor does the man from the bar, whose face I can’t see. Professional courtesy, I suspect. Just like Phuong, and maybe with the same temperature of low-level loathing. Nothing exists to spooks, not even themselves, and here I am out to find King Spook, living far far underground in his castle in Hades. Will he exist? Did he ever? Where the fuck am I? God lord, am I sick…
The chopper banks suddenly. I pitch to the side and vomit again, the bugs applauding inside me. I might die out here in the jungle without a bullet being fired.
The applause twists into a buzzing, and the sound of water. That old familiar reverberation, fueled by the natural laws and older than the land. The firstborn baby on this dumb spinning rock. The rush of the River gets louder, flooding the engines and slowing the spinning of the X above my head.
With my eyes closed, I can see the blur of green rushing below me like a limitless River as the sound rises up with the water, deafening. With my eyes closed, I can see Black Shuck running on top of the jungle canopy, taking great, bounding leaps at a leisurely but impossible speed. The helicopter is a small, defenseless bird just a little ways ahead and slightly above.
Black Shuck leaps with the sound of a roaring River, exploding into a cresting wave that engulfs the chopper and pulls me back into the water, swallowed up by the current.
30. The Ghosts Will Come For You
By the time the men struck camp the next morning and headed up to the ridgeline above the valley, the Hmong were already there, cracking open crates with great efficiency and very little sound, removing sturdy black cabinets, cables, rope, poles, industrial-size battery packs, and other delicate contrivances that seemed at odds with the rough surroundings. Judging by the treatment of the boxes and packaging, and the remnants of it disappearing into the jungle as if by a line of giant leafcutter ants, it looked like there was no plan to take any of the equipment back with the group.
Chapel walked among the tribesmen, exhorting them in their native tongue. Morganfield walked just behind Chapel, calculating figures on a clipboard and whispering suggestions, noting corrections.
The American soldiers were instructed to provide cover, rifles up, scanning every direction in complete confusion as to what was going on.
“Stay sharp,” Chapel said, moving over to the troops. “We have nine hours ‘til sundown.”
“We staying out here for nine hours?” Medrano said.
“I hope you got your beauty sleep last night, Medrano.”
“I didn’t,” Medrano said with a frown, thinking of his comb and mirror.
“What happens then?” Render said.
“When?” Chapel said.
“Sundown.”
“Everything,” Chapel said.
The men exchanged looks.
“No sleep?” Broussard said.
Chapel turned to him. “Pardon me, Specialist?”
“I mean, we’re not going to rest, to sleep?”
“Not tonight. You can sleep for the rest of your life. For the next eighteen hours, we do our work, and hope they don’t sleep either.”
“Who’s they?” Medrano said.
“The fucking lollipop guild, Medrano,” Morganfield said, writing figures on his clipboard.
“Hey, fuck you, man.”
“Keep your voices down,” Chapel said in a hushed tone, before walking back to the Hmong. He was edgy, tense. The men felt it.
“I was just asking,” Medrano said to Render. “Why he got to talk to me that way?”
“Spooks gonna spook,” Render said.
Medrano shook his head and readjusted the rifle in his hand, muttering curses in Spanish.
McNulty was the closest of the fire team to the tree line, where the Hmong were hoisting the square cabinets into the lowest, thickest branches and lashing them tight, black circles inside each meshed cube facing out toward the valley.
“Speakers?” McNulty said, pushing up the front of his helmet with his index finger. “Why the fuck did we bring speakers way out here? We doing a Sunday school broadcast for the heathen commies?”
“Did he say speakers?” Render asked Broussard.
“Maybe we having a concert,” Darby said. “Invite in all of the out-of-towners, show ’em some good ol’ American pie, and blast them to ever lovin’ Jesus.”
“In the middle of a fucking forest?” McNulty said.
“Jungle Woodstock,” Broussard said.
“With no stinkin’ hippies,” Medrano said.
“Maybe the fight comes to us,” Render said. “Maybe it’s on its way right fucking now, and this is some sort of…protection or something.”
“Forcefield,” Medrano said, nodding sagely, thinking back to his comic books.
“How would that make sense?” Broussard said to Render.
“What out here make sense, Cray?” Render said. “This ain’t regular military. This all irregular, you dig? I don’t know, man… We caught up in something weird.”
“You see those two mountains?” Morganfield said, walking up to the soldiers.
Everyone looked at the twin peaks, through which that burning river flowed the night before.
“A good portion of the entire 276th Regiment is holed up just behind that ridge and in the next valley,” Morganfield said with a casualness normally reserved for a breakfast order.
“Holy shit.” Render brought his rifle to his shoulder and ducked down.
“Righteous,” Darby said with a grin.
“There’s a thousand gooks behind them mountains?” McNulty’s voice rose an octave.
“How do you know that?” Render asked.
“Because that’s what we do,” Morganfield said. “Know.”
“A thousand fucking gooks?” McNulty was nearly screaming.
“Give or take a dozen,” Chapel said, rejoining the group. “And keep your voice down..”
“Sir!” McNulty said, moving quickly toward Chapel, who frowned at him. McNulty lowered his voice. “Sir, I-I don’t mean to overstep, but—”
“Every step you make is an overstep, PV2,” Chapel said.
McNulty swallowed that, which made his face flush. “Be that as it may, sir, but the gooners don’t have a 276th Regiment. 274th and 275th, but there’s no such thing as the 276th.”
Render looked at Broussard, genuinely impressed with McNulty for the first time since they’d met.