That was true, but she sensed that that line of argument would not get far with the exclusively male assemblage. She felt Belew’s gray eyes on her. He sat up at his end of the table serene and centered as an Occidental Buddha. He was testing her. She hated him for it.
If only they had listened to me, gone back to Fort Venceremos to explain to the Colonel why J. J. killed Spoiler. The Brigade is still fighting for justice, no matter how far off the path some of its members have strayed.
Yet how can I back out now?
“I feel compassion, yes,” she said slowly. For some reason she could not bear to fail in front of Belew, and she hated him still more for that. “How can we help the people by doing them harm? But more crucial, from your male perspective, is that by resorting to terror against noncombatants, we defeat ourselves.”
Nguyen puffed up as if to spit an interjection. Wondering at her lack of civility, she plunged on. “If we brutalize civilians, they will come to hate and fear us more than they do the government; they will come to see the government forces as the lesser of two evils. Just as villagers were driven to join the Viet Cong after they saw their homes and loved ones burned in napalm attacks.”
She glanced then at Belew; the remark was a barb. If it found its target, he showed no sign. “Also,” she went on, missing the single beat, “we play into the hands of the government: we allow them to portray us as bandits.”
“The world media are accustomed to making excuses for communist regimes,” Belew said. “They’ve been doing it have a powerful inclination to treat us as bad guys. We might be wise not to make it any easier for them.”
Though his body language still bespoke tense anger, Colonel Nguyen made an airy wave. “What do we care for world opinion?”
“We wish to be recognized,” said Duong Linh. The assembly’s elder statesman, except for Belew himself, he sat at the far end of the table. He was a wispy man with a wispy gray beard and round eyeglasses, who closely resembled Ho Chi Minh. A leader of Vietnam’s sizable community of covert Catholics, he had been born in Hanoi. As a youth in the early 1960s he fled south to Hue. He attended seminary school for a time, then dropped out, married, and began to raise a family. His wife, three children, and mother were killed in the communist massacres during Tet, 1968. He himself escaped only by chance. He had spent five years in the dreaded trai cai tao – “camp/transform/recreate,” reeducation camps. Since 1987 he had been living underground.
It was perhaps not surprising that he appeared elderly, though he was only in his late forties or early fifties.
“That gives us an immediate interest in what the world thinks of us,” Duong said in his barely audible voice. His accent had more soft Hue drawl than Hanoi harshness.
Colonel Nguyen grunted. “Very well,” he said without grace. “Then certainly we must all agree our first priority is to engage the government’s forces in battle, secure a victory as quickly as possible to establish our credibility”
Before she could stop herself, Moonchild blurted, “No.”
“Your impertinence disgraces this council,” Nguyen said, turning to her. His posture was still sprawled and casual, but the words squeezed from him like toothpaste from a tube, betraying his anger. His left hand suddenly swept around in a backhand slap to Moonchild’s face.
Her own right hand snapped up and caught Nguyen’s hand an inch from her face.
He jumped to his feet, his wooden chair slamming over backward with a clatter that sent the lizards scrambling up the wall to the shadow-hidden rafters. Fury leached the color from his face. His American.45 appeared in his hand. Moonchild was already up. As the tendons stood out on the back of the colonel’s hand, drawing his forefinger tight on the trigger, she whipped around in a spinning back-scythe kick, blinding fast.
Her foot struck the pistol. The weapon shattered like a rubber ball dunked in liquid nitrogen and hit with a hammer.
Colonel Nguyen stood there, the skin practically slumping off his face in surprise, holding the grip that was all that remained of his pistol, pumping the now-flaccid trigger. He threw the ruined weapon down and stamped out of the ballroom.
After an interval of very silent silence, Chou, the Hoa leader, spoke: “He’ll be back.” An ethnic Chinese, Chou compensated for having been a law professor at Minh Mang, the university in Ho Chi Minh City, by affecting warlord drag: thinning hair drawn back in a queue, Fu Manchu mustache, and two revolvers with what Moonchild very much feared were real ivory grips belted below his capacious belly.
The farmer who represented the Annamese secessionists from central Vietnam laughed. “Small loss if he doesn’t.”
The conferees sat very quietly to hear Moonchild’s objections to engaging the People’s Army in direct battle. These amounted to the fact that, desertion-riddled and dispersed though it was, PAVN was still mighty big and mean and would smash them flat in open conflict unless weakened substantially. It was a cogent argument, even the self-effacing Isis had to admit. Of course, her articulate advocacy might not be the only reason for her listeners’ respectful attention.
The discussion moved to the particulars of indirect strategy. Moonchild gratefully let the cup of conversation pass from her. She was uncomfortable standing out. Besides, her hour was drawing to a close. She would have to leave shortly.
A couple of Suon San’s bandy-legged little gunslingers walked in escorting a man in a yellow American-style polo shirt and white slacks. He was taller than most of the attendees, more squarely built. Belew rose to greet him with a smile.
“This is Kim Giau Minh,” Belew said, shaking the new arrival’s hand. “He’s an expert in the very kind of warfare we’ve been discussing. He fought as a counterinsurgency commando in Cambodia. His father was a North Korean engineer, and during his hitch in the People’s Army, Kim here was sent to North Korea’s famed schools for aspiring terrorists, where he studied death and destruction alongside the best and the brightest of Provo, ETA-Militar, and Nur al-Allah henchmen.”
Shaking hands around the table, Kim smiled and bobbed his close-cropped head shyly, as if embarrassed by vast praise. He came to Moonchild and his eyes lit.
“I have heard much about you,” he said in English, vigorously shaking the hand she offered him, then, “Choum boepgetsumnida. Kim Giau Minh rago hamnida.”
She stood there staring at him with horror seeping down over her face and body like blood from a scalp cut. She did not understand a word.
He said something else. The words struck no sparks of meaning in her mind.
He took her hand in both of his. “Asimnikka?” he asked, frowning with concern.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled her hand back, turned, and ran.
Blindly she stumbled out of the derelict villa, off the grand veranda, several steps across granite flagstones laid to keep expensive European shoes from contact with the red mud. She dropped to her knees, hands on thighs, weeping soundlessly.
The Khmer Rouge standing to the left of the doorway with his Kalashnikov slung started forward. From the other side of the door Lou Inmon cleared his throat, held out a warning claw, and shook his head. The Cambodian stopped.
Grandfather, that had to be Korean he was speaking to me. And I did not understand a word.
What am I?
She breathed deep, from the diaphragm, trying to find her center. She wasn’t sure she ever could again.
Isis.
She stopped breathing. She had thought her name without willing it.
Isis. Do you hear me?
It was as if a voice was speaking in her mind. A… familiar… voice.
“Eric?” she whispered.
“Yes, Isis. It’s me. Surprised?”
“Yes.”
“Limited telepathy is one of my gifts, hon. Very limited, I’m afraid. I think our – closeness – gives me better range with you. By the way, you don’t have to talk out loud. Just think at me and I’ll hear.”