“He seemed surprised to see me here.”
“He did? That was theater. I’m sure he knew you were here. Susan probably told him. She’s been out here so she knows you’re not living at the Funny Farm any more. He knows you’re friends. I’ll bet he chats her up every chance he gets; especially if Sandy’s not around.”
“What’s Sandy got to do with it?”
“Jealousy. I think she’s more than a secretary.”
“You also talk like you’d take him up on it if he offered. By the way Susan’s coming out in a couple of days while she’s in port.”
“Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t can’t tell now but keep Susan out of this. She has no need to know.”
“I mean— I mean, would you jump back into a scene like The Nam? I mean there were times I shit my pants twice in the same day and only once was on account of fear. The only thing that made it even remotely tolerable was living in the Hotel. And I even had a rich girlfriend in Saigon. But you — you were in the fucking bush, up country the whole time. I had it dicked but even so I don’t think I’d do it again.”
“The bush didn’t bother me much. We’re not living much above that now. The cabin’s not much better than some of the hooches I lived in. I’ll just wait and see what magic trick Mike pulls out of his hat. I worked with him a lot and you can never tell what he might come up with.”
“You know,” I said. “Something I never thought to tell you before this; one, because I forgot about it and, two, it didn’t really seem important. —”
“What’s that?”
“When I was at the recon base up country, there was a short airfield big enough to land C-47s. AA planes and choppers were in and out everyday. One day Halftrack came in on one of AA’s C-47s and off loaded half a dozen pallets with smallish bags of sugar and several wooden crates and stored them in my warehouse. He said they’d come from Vientiane, Laos. Then they loaded the sugar onto another C-47a few days later and took off for Bangkok. I was in the radio room waiting for a phone patch and heard them file the flight plan. They were back two days later with a couple cases of Foster’s and some rowdy Aussies in bush hats. And a big guy in civvies wearing real green beret. An American.”
“Sugar? Is that what he told you? Pallet loads of sugar? Aussies —That would have been a banking connection,”said Roland. “I would have bet against dope except for what you just told me. That went on way north, up in I corps; flying in and out of Laos even when I left in mid ’69.
“Actually, Halftrack stored several loads in my warehouse there. The rest were wooden crates but I know the first load of wooden crates, went to Rangoon and belonged to DB.
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was on the plane from Saigon they came in on. Halftrack told me that DB had made a buy of black-market rifles.”
“Virgil and DB were trying a really risky, penny-anti scheme to get money out of the country through me but I wouldn’t go through with it. I know they talked about getting that sort of action going.” There must have been tons of money in it.”
In The Belly Of the Beast 