PROLOGUE
PAKAU VILLAGE
40 MILES NORTH OF SAIGON
OCTOBER 13, 1970
It was raining again.
In this part of the world, it was always raining. The two men stopped in their tracks, then the big one began to move quickly. “Goddamnit,” David Collier barked at The Grape. “Wait the fuck up, Grape—lemme drink this shit!”
He lifted the bottle of Wild Turkey to his mouth; once again he took a monster slug. It was Kentucky’s finest sippin’ whiskey. Collier felt it burning all the way to the bottom of his stomach. The rain slashed at his face as he drank—the wild monsoon rain of the South China Sea. “Trooper,” he roared at The Grape, who was struggling through the howling gale. “I can tell you one thing: this ain’t fucking Boston! You want some of this booze?”
The Grape only spat. Broad-shouldered and powerful, the 2nd Squad grenadier scowled angrily at him. “I told you already, Collier, I don’t want any of that shit. I want to get me some smoke. Got to visit mamasan in her hooch.”
“Okay, shitbird, lead on.” Staggering each time his boots bogged down in the mud of the jungle road, Collier struggled to jam the bottle back into his cartridge belt.
He yanked the M-16 higher up on his shoulder, and they slogged forward twenty or thirty yards. The rain fell in blinding sheets, ripped at their drenched U.S. Army ponchos like the claws of a snarling jungle cat. Like a hissing voice endlessly repeating: Go away. Go home.
“Up there,” roared The Grape after a few more steps. He pointed to the next bend in the road, where several thatched huts huddled together under the tossing mangroves. The tiny bamboo houses were marooned in the yellow muck of the Mekong jungle. “Mamasan be sellin’ them party packs, two bucks a pop. And that ain’t all, bro. She’s hidin’ a little surprise. I caught a look at it, last time I bought me some smoke.”
Collier only grunted. “What, a whore? I don’t need it, Grape.” Left hand clutching the rifle sling, he patted the sippin’ whiskey with his right. “Fuck that smoke, man. Fuck the pussy, too. I got what I need right here.”
They shouldered their way into the old woman’s hut. The bamboo walls were bare, except for a couple of brass candle sconces, ancestral relics that glimmered fitfully in the uncertain light. Collier found himself staring into the jade-green eyes of a yawning Siamese cat lying motionless on a cedar trunk just inside the door of the hooch. Collier kept drinking. The mamasan ducked behind a frayed curtain, then re-emerged holding several fat joints tied together with a piece of yellow string.
“You done good, bitch,” said The Grape, handing her two soaked dollar bills. He sat down on the mud floor and began to undo the string.
Collier drank from his bottle. His face blazed. The room had begun to drift. Drunk as he was, however, Collier felt edgy; something in the hooch struck him as sinister. Was it the flickering eyes of the cat? “Goddamn, Grape. Let’s get outta here!”
The Grape didn’t look up. “Don’t fuck with my high, Davey. We ain’t goin’ nowhere—not till I get to see that piece of ass she’s hiding.”
The Grape had a joint free and was struggling to tease a flame from a book of rain-dampened matches. Finally, he succeeded. The match flared . . . and Collier watched him take a jumbo hit, the business end of the weed glowing red-hot, bright as cherry neon. The Grape hit it again. And again. Collier drank, and worried. He was so far from home. So far from Laura. He could hear the wind creaking through the mangroves outside, moaning and bellowing like a chorus of mourners anticipating a funeral.
The Grape came up to one knee. His face had gone ashen, dead, cold. Collier felt the flicker of real fear: he had spotted something dark, something alien in that face. “Mamasan, what say you give us a look-see at that back room?” He was gesturing toward the curtain with his lit joint. “I think you be hidin’ some sweetmeat on me, mama!”
Collier watched. What the fuck was going on?
The old woman was frightened. She took a step backward, hoping to block the entrance to the room behind the curtain. Suddenly she began moaning in a singsong voice both guttural and jagged: Cac ong du’ng vao, GI Trooper! Cac ong du’ng vao, GI Trooper!
Don’t go in there, GI Trooper!
The Grape was standing tall now. His hazel eyes had gone distant, dreamy. “I asked you what you was hiding.” He shoved the mamasan out of his way and pushed the curtain aside.
A young girl lay motionless, wide-eyed, on a straw mattress.
“Well, well, well,” said The Grape. “Oh yes, indeedy.”
Collier watched the room tilt. Around and around they went, like on the carousel he’d ridden as a kid at Canobie Lake Park.
Cac ong du’ng vao, GI Trooper!
Don’t go in there, GI Trooper!
“Well, well, well.” The Grape was fumbling with his trouser belt. Finally he managed to unbuckle it; his pants dropped toward his knees. Collier’s tongue felt like it weighed 400 pounds. “Hey, Grape,” he struggled to talk. “Knock it off, man!”
No response. The Grape reached for the girl. The mamasan had begun to flutter and shriek. Like a chicken in distress. Was all of this really happening? The bottle slid from Collier’s hand, thunked against the mud floor. Around and around he went on his drunken carousel. “Grape, I said knock it off! You can’t . . .” but Collier’s tongue got hung up somewhere in mid-syllable. He stood there gaping, while the hooch twirled and twirled.
The girl on the mattress started shrieking, as The Grape yanked her up to her knees and began ripping away at her yellow shift. She screamed once—a high-pitched wail of pure terror—and The Grape responded with a vicious head-slap that nearly knocked her unconscious. Now both women were bellowing, weeping . . . silly chickens, both of them!
Was Collier dreaming this shit, or what? He stared into the wet jade eyes of the cat, even as the spooked feline leaped from the cedar chest. He watched the bright red blood leak from the girl’s nostrils. The heat, the ripe stench of the jungle hut, the wind screeching and gnawing at the leafy mangrove: too much, man.
“Grape!” Collier slurred the nickname badly and nearly went down to his knees, “Thish is too fucking much, man, you’re outta line, goddamnit—this is fucking RAPE.
“Grape, I’m warning you . . . if you touch that kid, I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
It worked! Amazed, Collier realized that it had worked. Because the Grape was turning away from the girl now. He was pissed, for sure, but Collier could read the fear in his eyes. Grape was backing off. The girl was going to be spared.
It was a moment he knew he would never forget. In the corner of one eye, Collier saw the cat crouching against the wall of the hooch. Saw the cat’s green eyes flare. Moving in slow motion the mamasan leaned forward at the waist, bending way over to reach into the cedar chest. Collier saw her come up with a six-inch knife blade that glittered like a bright jewel sparkling in the dim, smoky light of the hooch, a brass-handled knife carved with crawling snakes, and then he saw her turn.
She seemed dreamlike now, floating like a ballet dancer through the stage lights toward The Grape and screaming Su nguyen rua!—I curse you!— and Collier saw the long knife-blade flashing above The Grape, who was clearly about to die—
BRRAAAAPPP-BRRAAAAPP!
Horrified, yet fascinated, Collier watched the old woman’s head coming apart. He’d stitched the side of her skull with five or six rounds, and now blood was gushing from the stitches, along with shiny gray brain tissue seeping like melting yogurt from her smashed skull and then dribbling down her cheekbone—
Goodbye, Mamasan . . . He’d shot her out of pure instinct. Out of his training . . . with his trigger finger moving of its own will . . .
Goodbye, Mamasan.
He watched her fall. The old woman’s face was collapsing inward on itself, opening up like an earthquake fault. Transfixed, Collier watched her features changing into earth, mud, falling stones, gnarled tree roots that lurched toward the sky.
At the very last instant, a frozen stare from her one remaining eye . . . and something leapt from it into his eye. Something shot out of her remote jungle world into his eye.
A force. An energy.
A curse!
As they raced from the blood-spattered hut, Collier grabbed the knife. The Grape was tearing at his arm: “Davey—the bottle. Get the fucking bottle!” Collier skidded, whirled and turned back to retrieve the empty Wild Turkey bottle . . . then smashed it to slivers against the side of a rain-whipped tree trunk.
Leaving the village behind, they raced back down the muddy road. Collier kept staring at the knife’s ornately carved brass handle, with its nest of slithering snakes.
“Thanks, bro. Hey, you done saved The Grape. She was gonna cut me, man!”
“Grape!” Collier screamed. “You fucking animal—they were human beings!”
All he got back was the deafening roar of the wind.
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