Slash and Burn

to had vanished. He wondered how long he’d been alone. He held on to his glass as if he might tip backwards off the stool should he let go of it. Then someone stepped inside his vacuum.
    “Excuse me.”
    Cueball Dave swiveled his neck around slowly as if it was starting to rust and saw the homo standing there. He was dressed as a man but any Asian in a place like this was after something.
    “Look, son. I don’t—” he started.
    “I’m sorry to trouble you, but aren’t you David Leon?”
    “I might be.”
    “You don’t remember me? I was one of your flight mechanics at Udon. Manuel Castillo. Manny. From the Philippines?”
    “Well, yeah. Sure,” said Dave. He had no idea who this boy was but he didn’t want to make himself sound like he thought all Asians looked the same. Young for a field mechanic though. Perhaps he’d met him. Too much of a coincidence for it to be a pickup line.
    “I’m so happy. I knew it was you,” said the young man.
    Manuel Castillo, or whatever his name was, threw his arms around the ex-pilot before the old boy could get out of his way. His cufflink caught on Cueball Dave’s neck. Then the lights went out.
    The Baby Booby Agogo didn’t exactly close. It wound down and then wound back up again depending on how many customers were there and how much money they were spending. Cueball Dave wasn’t spending any money and he was taking up valuable space. He’d been unconscious on the countertop for an hour and he made the place look low class. The mamasan , a sprightly old lady whose makeup appeared lime green under the mood lights, decided that, regular customer or not, Dave had overstayed his welcome. She shook him roughly but he didn’t react. After her second attempt to rouse him, she felt for his pulse. She was a woman of vast experience so her next reaction was to take out his wallet, remove all but twenty baht , replace the wallet and shout for the bar manager. Another customer had chosen the Baby Booby as his final resting place.

6
    THE EAST WING
    The Friendship Hotel in Phonsavan, designed like a hunting lodge, so they say, had originally been called the Snow Leopard Inn. It was very close to the old airfield and a short walk from one of the many jar clusters on the Plain of Jars. The hotel was built and occupied for many years by Corsican drug dealers in the heyday of the plain’s notorious opium trade. The building served as a warehouse for pressed opium and the mafia pilots made daily stops at the heroin processing plants before delivering their wicked wares to the poor saps fighting in Vietnam. When local politics and war forced the Europeans out of business, the building was renovated and rooms were added. There was nothing remarkable about the Friendship Hotel other than the miracle of its continued presence. It stood amid a landscape of craters in the most bombed area of the war. It somehow avoided the total decimation of every recognizable structure from hospitals to pig pens and nobody could explain why it was still standing, not even allowing for the well-documented lack of expertise of the Royal Lao bomber pilots. There was overwhelming evidence of near misses. The surrounding countryside was littered with unexploded ordnance and large signs at the hotel perimeter warned guests not to venture beyond the fence. The signs were written in Lao and Russian.
    Whether the USMIA task-force members were aware they’d be sleeping in the one-time hub of the Indochinese drug trade was hard to say. But they’d certainly been briefed on the dangers of taking leisurely strolls through the countryside. The hotel manager, a small bubbly Hmong by the name of Toua, had assured the government that the grounds had been cleared of explosives before the extra bungalows were erected behind the main building. Even so, as they hurriedly assembled the bamboo chalets for the MIA teams, a worker had run his hoe into a cluster bomb and lost a foot. He’d become a member of a sizeable club. Few of the residents of Phonsavan could claim a complete set of limbs or appendages. Between 1964 and 1973 there were some 500,000 bombing missions in Laos. Two-point-three million tons of ordnance were rained upon the land. Almost half of this was in the form of cluster bombs; “bombies” as they were affectionately known. And a third of those hadn’t gone off. Not yet. Since the ceasefire, the sly little devils had claimed another twenty-thousand victims. Operation Rain Dance had begun to