Slash and Burn

the first idea what the guy in the next office is up to. Hell, I’ve heard about two identical operations set up by different departments run on the same day. Guys were tripping over each other.”
    “Now, the reason this place comes to mind, is that some of the pilots I have in mind had that same odd thing going with their time records. They’d put in their sheets at the end of the month and there’d be four days unmarked here, a week there. But they never claimed holidays or sick days. None of the brass ever queried it. One of our fighter pilots called it the Tahkli lottery. If you got lucky and didn’t get yourself killed, you’d come back with a whole heap of money in your pocket.”
    “And some didn’t come back?” asked Auntie Bpoo.
    “You’d never know,” Johnson told her. “If anyone was MIA it was always swung around somehow to look like a regular mission gone wrong. You won’t find the name of any active US military personnel MIA in Laos unless they got lost. There was a lot of clumsy border misidentification, if you know what I mean. Guess you can’t always trust all that expensive cockpit equipment.”
    “So, do you think Boyd might have been deployed on special ops by Air America?” Phosy asked.
    “Why not? Air America was CIA.”
    “But how would we ever be able to find out what he was involved in?” Dtui asked.
    “Ask him,” said Civilai, ever hopeful.
    “All right,” said Yamaguchi. “It’s the thing about the flight mechanic that worries me. Boyd returns quite unexpectedly from the grave and within a month his mechanic meets a mysterious end.”
    “Not to mention the chief mechanic from Long Cheng,” Siri added. “He died within days of Sebastian. Then there was the pilot Wolff who’d drunk with them on their last night together. Odd that all the American witnesses to that last flight are now out of the reckoning.”
    “Except for Boyd,” Civilai smiled.
    “You think your pilot’s running around killing everyone, Civilai?” Siri asked.
    “Why not? Revenge for getting him addicted to drugs. He’s probably been in an opium den for the last ten years.”
    “See, this is something I’ve never really understood about the transfer of Leon from Saigon to Long Cheng,” said Johnson. “If he was involved in ‘inappropriate behavior’ serious enough to have his flying license pulled, what was he still doing in the service? I remember he was using drugs back then, he wasn’t the only one. He got a couple of warnings. So inappropriate behaviour could have been a euphemism for losing control of his habit, or dealing. But if you’re caught at either it’s a dishonorable discharge. You’re out. You don’t get transferred to an inactive post somewhere else in the war. Not even Air America would take you on.”
    “So how do you think he got here?” Gordon asked.
    “Well, either he didn’t actually do anything wrong and it was just a ruse to get him out of Nam and into this specific role in Laos for some reason, or he did do it and he had mighty big friends in high places who found him an easy well-paid job up here.”
    “Which makes you wonder whether all this is about drugs,” said Dtui.
    “Oh, I very much doubt they’d need clandestine operations for drug dealing,” said Civilai. “It was hardly a secret the CIA were buying up all the Hmong opium and selling it as heroin on the streets of Saigon. They had regular scheduled flights from Long Cheng to Vietnam full of the stuff. The pilots used to land upside down just from the fumes.”
    “All right, so not drugs,” said Yamaguchi. “What else could he have been involved in?”
    “I’m afraid war gives you a lot of scope for profiteering,” said Madame Daeng. “There’s no end to the possibilities.”
    “Then let’s start with something we know,” said Gordon. “Boyd was carrying something he shouldn’t have been that night.”
    He held up a sheet of typed foolscap.
    “This is the official manifest for Boyd’s cargo when he left Udon,” he said. “Pretty standard stuff for those milk runs: rice, blankets, nails, canned food. But here, tucked away at the end is twenty tengallon containers of cooking oil. It was all destined for the refugee camp at Sam Tong.”
    “You think there’s something suspicious about it?” Siri asked.
    “I do. Air America flights stopped doing overnights in Long Cheng in sixty-seven. They had their own dorm in Sam Tong right next to the refugee camp. If all he had