Rainfall

have accepted an offer to trade my risk for his. Not that it was worth arguing over.

    “You just stop the car,” I told him. “I’ll take care of the rest.”

    He nodded, then bowed with unsettling formality.

    “Good luck, Rain-san,” he said, and walked off into the gathering darkness.

22

    I LOVE TOKYO at night. It’s the lights, I think: more than the architecture, more, even, than its sounds and scents, the lights are what animate the city’s nocturnal spirit. There is brightness: streets alight with neon, with the urgent blinking of constellations of pachinko parlors, streets where the store windows and the headlights of a thousand passing cars illuminate the pavement as brightly as the halogen lamps of a night baseball game. And there is gloom: alleys lit by nothing more than the fluorescent glow of a lonely vending machine, left leaning against the worn brick like an old man who’s given up on everything and wants only to catch his breath, streets lit only by the yellowish pall of lamplights spaced so widely that a passing figure and his shadow seem to evaporate in the dim spaces between.

    I walked the gloomy backstreets of Ebisu after Tatsu departed, heading toward the Imperial Hotel in Hibiya, where I would stay until this thing was over. For near-suicidal audacity, what I was about to do would rank with any of the missions I had undertaken during my days with SOG, or with those of the mercenary conflicts that came after. I wondered if Tatsu’s bow was some kind of epitaph.

    Well, you’ve survived missions before that ought to have been your last,
I thought, letting loose a memory.

    After our rampage in Cambodia, things started going bad for my unit. Up until then the killing had been pretty impersonal. You get into a firefight, you’re just aiming at tracer rounds, you can’t even see the people who are firing back at you. Maybe later you’ll find blood or brains, maybe some bodies. Or we’d hear one of the claymore booby traps we’d laid go off a klik or two away, and know we’d nailed someone. But the thing we did at Cu Lai was different. It affected us.

    I knew what we had done was wrong, but I rationalized by saying hey, we’re at war; wrong things happen in wars. Some of the other guys got morose, guilt making them gun-shy. Crazy Jake — Jimmy — went the opposite way. He locked himself even tighter into the war’s embrace.

    Crazy Jake was fanatically loyal to his Yards — short for Montagnards — and they responded to that. When a Yard was lost in a firefight, Jake would deliver the bad news personally to the village chief. He eschewed army barracks, preferring to sleep in the Yard quarters. He learned their language and their customs, participated in their ceremonies and rituals. Plus, the Yards believed in magic — the villages had their own sorcerers — and a man with Jake’s killing record walked with a powerful aura.

    All this made the brass uncomfortable, because they didn’t command the Yards’ respect. The problem got worse when we were assigned to beef up the fortified hamlets at Bu Dop, on the Cambodian border, because it exposed Crazy Jake to more of the indigenous population.

    Frustrated with the rules of engagement set by the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, and with MACV’s inability to root out the mole who was compromising SOG’s operations, Jake started using Bu Dop as a staging ground for independent missions against the Vietcong in Cambodia. The Yards hated the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese had been shitting on them throughout history, and they were happy to follow Crazy Jake on his lethal forays. But SOG was being disbanded, and Vietnamization — that is, turning the war over to the Vietnamese so that America could back out — was the order of the day. MACV told him to shut off the Cambodian ops, but Jake refused — said it was just part of defending his hamlets.

    So MACV recalled him to Saigon. Jake ignored them. A detachment was sent in to retrieve him, and never returned. This was even more spooky than if they had been slaughtered, their severed heads run up on pikes. Did they turn and join Crazy Jake? Did he have that much magic? Did he just disappear them into thin air?

    So they cut off his supplies. No more weapons, no more materiel. But Jake wouldn’t cease and desist. MACV figured out that he was selling poppy to finance his operation. Jake had become his own universe. He had a self-sustaining, highly effective,