Chinaman’s Chance
- Автор: Томас Росс
- Серия: Arthur Case Wu #1
- Год: 1978
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon & Schuster
- ISBN: 978-0-671-24070-7
- Жанр: Политические детективы
Электронная книга - «Chinaman’s Chance». Краткое содержание книги:
Wu grinned around his cigar again. “Everybody in Papeete used to tell me I looked like a spy. What the hell, it was good for business.”
“After Papeete, then?” James said.
Wu moved his heavy shoulders slightly in a shrug of sorts. “We moved around the Pacific for a while and then to Bangkok.”
“He was there, wasn’t he? In Bangkok. Simms.”
“Yeah, he came through a few times.”
James looked as if he wanted to pursue that further, but then abruptly changed his mind. “And from Bangkok you went back to the States and finally down to Key West. This would be ’69 by now, right?”
“About then,” Durant said.
“Who made the approach?”
“He sent somebody,” Wu said.
“Who?”
“One of your old buddies from your OSS days. Simms’s gray eminence. The Frenchman.”
“Lopinot?” James said.
Wu nodded. “That’s right. The sly fox himself. What was he then?” he asked Durant.
“In ’69? Fifty-three probably. Maybe fifty-four.”
“And Lopinot made you the proposition?”
“Right,” Durant said.
“Tell me about it.”
Durant leaned back and looked at James curiously. “You know all about it.”
“I think we should review.”
Durant rubbed his nose and sighed. “All right. He and Lopinot had teamed up, and the Agency had sent them into Cambodia with God knows how much money. They set up their own fiefdom and sent out the word that they were looking for recruits. Well, they showed up from all over — Germans, South Africans, old Foreign Legion types, a lot of the scum from the Congo, a few Biafra veterans, some English, even some Americans. Their job was to soften things up for the Cambodia — what did they call it — incursion. The problem was supply. Lopinot offered us the contract.”
“And you took it,” James said, making it almost an accusation rather than a question.
“That’s right,” Wu said. “We took it.”
“For the money, of course.”
Wu nodded. “It was a fat contract.”
“So you set up shop in Bangkok again.”
“We had an office and a warehouse and some trucks in Bangkok and a jumping-off place at the border. We leased two helicopters from one of the CIA fronts, hired some pilots, and flew the stuff in at night. Either Artie or I would go along on every trip.”
“How many men did he have?” James said.
“He had about five dozen mercenaries, not counting what he’d had rounded up by press-gangs. It wasn’t an unusual situation. The Agency had a number of guys like Simms operating out there then, although most of them were in Vietnam. And most of them had smaller operations than Simms, but not all. He controlled about a fifty-mile-square area, and they’d started calling him the Dirty Duke.” Durant paused. “With good reason.”
“And you ran him supplies until when — ’72?” James said.
“May fifteenth,” Durant said automatically as if the date were as familiar to him as his birthday.
James nodded slowly. “You had known Mlle. Gelinet for quite some time then, hadn’t you?”
“About a year,” Durant said. “A little more.”
“And she was with—”
“Paris-Match.”
“Yes. She was quite an excellent journalist.”
“And photographer,” Wu said.
“Yes, of course.” James used his right hand to smooth his thick white hair. It was the first even slightly nervous gesture he had made. His second one came when he cleared his throat before saying, “You were quite fond of each other, I understand.”
Durant stared at him for a long moment, for nearly five seconds, and then nodded slightly, just once.
Artie Wu took his stub of a cigar out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “They were sweet on each other. They were going to go back to Paris and get married. Or live together. Whichever.”
Durant glanced at Wu. “I’ll tell it.”
Wu shrugged. “Sure.”
“The rumors started filtering in. About Simms, I mean. The Dirty Duke. All sorts of rumors. Christine wanted to do a story on him, an interview. The next time I went in I checked it out with Lopinot. He liked the idea — maybe because she was from Paris-Match. Lopinot liked publicity. You remember that book he wrote.”
“Yes,” James said. “Rather self-serving, I always thought.”
“Anyway, Simms wasn’t around, but Lopinot gave the okay. We set the drop zone for a week later. Well, when I got back to Bangkok another old friend of ours had shown up. Jack Crespin of CBS. We’d known him in Papeete and then later down in Key West. He’d heard about the Dirty Duke too. I said okay, fine, he could go along when I took Christine in. So we went in and they were waiting for us.” Durant paused.
James waited for him to go on. When Durant didn’t, James cleared his throat again and said, “They?”
“It was a crack combat team. North Vietnamese. A long-range group led by a Captain Kham. We came in at night, of course, and the signal lights were right. They knew we were coming.”
There was another silence. “I got out of the chopper first. Then Christine. They shot her a second later. I don’t know why. Kham later said it was a mistake. Jack Crespin, well, he was half out and half in and he was trying to get all the way back in when they shot him too, and he fell back in. The pilot didn’t wait around for me.”
James shook his head and murmured, “Most unfortunate.”
“Wasn’t it, though?” Durant said.
“Then came the interrogation?” James said.
“They used a whip,” Durant said. “That was later, of course. They wanted to know a lot of things that I didn’t know, so I tried lying. Making things up. Well, I wasn’t too good at it — not good enough, anyway — so the Little Shit brought out the whip.”
“The Little Shit?”
“He was their intelligence officer. Very smart, very mean, very little about five feet high, maybe less. His name was Lieutenant Nguyen Van Dung. The Little Shit. He had a seven-foot-long whip made out of water buffalo hide. I got three dozen of the best over a period of three days. They got everything out of me that they wanted and after that they left me alone. It was seven feet deep. The hole, I mean. Maybe two feet wide and five feet long. What it really was, I guess, was my grave.”
James looked at Wu. “How did you manage it?”
Wu shrugged. “I knew where he was — or where the drop zone was, anyhow — so I hired some help and went in and got him out. It was hit and run just before daylight. Nothing fancy.”
“It sounds extraordinary.”
Wu clamped down on his cigar as if to cut off any further discussion. “It wasn’t.”
“And afterward?” James said.
“Artie canceled us out of everything after we got back to Bangkok,” Durant said. “I was in a hospital for ten days. After that we went to Honolulu. And from there to Aberdeen.”
“Why there?”
“It was cold and wet and far away and it seemed like a good idea.” Durant paused. “And it was.”
“And Simms?”
“What about him?”
“Did you ever figure out why?”
“Sure,” Artie Wu said. “Lopinot should’ve checked first before he agreed to let Quincy bring Christine in. When Simms found out, he canceled everything and moved — except he didn’t bother to tell us.”
“Kham caught a straggler,” Durant said. “That’s why the landing signals were right.”
“How did you feel?” James said.
“About what?”
“Simms.”
Durant smiled slightly. “I would’ve killed him. Then.”