Chapter 1

These are the reminiscences of a cranky old man, born in the Twentieth Century.

There is an old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Some demigod decided they didn’t like me and turned it into, “May you live an interesting life.”

Here’s my story:

At the end of the Vietnam War there were a few people like me who didn’t exist, at least on paper. I wasn’t in the Social Security records, the IRS files, or even the live birth records of the Great State of Iowa. My mom told me I was born at 6AM, one frosty morning in Mercy Hospital, and I don’t think mom would have any reason to lie about it.

On the other hand, one part of my life was built on lies. Lies were my life blood and the tools of my trade. As far as the normal paper and computer records were concerned, Mike Mitchell didn’t exist.

The Vietnam War ended and I was suddenly unemployed due to circumstances beyond my control. Now my Uncle Sam wanted to make sure I was on file, could be gainfully employed, and start paying taxes as the price for all those rights and privileges they kept telling me were mine as an American Citizen.

Before they brought me in from the cold, I had one last mission. One last job. It was to rid the world of a Chinese agent who had sent hundreds of American soldiers to their graves by keeping the Viet Cong and the NVA supplied with weapons. True the war was winding down, but those eighteen-year-old kids who got blown up deserved more than just a gravestone and a crying momma. We finally knew where the bastard was, and I was going to eliminate him.

Normally I’d drop in, take out the target from a thousand yards, crawl through the mud, swim a river or two, and get myself to somewhere safe. The problem for me was that this time my bosses wanted positive identification of the target and evidence of the kill.

Comrade porky was getting married, so I setup my position where I could get a clear shot when he went up the steps to the wedding venue. In these shithole jungle towns there are no tall towers or structures to use, so I found some kind of mutant palm tree at the edge of the jungle. It had a main trunk and then two branching trunks that supported two crowns. The “Vee” made by the two branching trunks looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, but it made a decent place to shoot from.

I was counting on my kill shot to create fear and chaos that would send everyone diving for cover long enough for me to get confirmation of identity and proof of death.

Early in the morning I climbed up the tree and got in position. I was going to use a light weight carbine that was chambered for a high velocity round. I was much less than a thousand yards away. I didn’t need to haul the weight, and we really didn’t want the surviving comrades to get their hands on our highest tech sniper rifle. My hybrid carbine wouldn’t teach them anything new and they wouldn’t be able to get ammunition to use it against us if I wasn’t able to destroy it. The rifle was disposable.

Comrade Portly started climbing the steps. He stopped to pose for a picture, and then his skull exploded and he pitched down the steps. I dropped down out of the tree, ran to the body, cut off the corpse’s index finger, and took a picture of his ugly face. The cheap Polaroid produced a good enough picture. I was smashing the camera when a girl in a white silk dress came out of the building.

In nearly perfect English she said, “Thank you. I was sold to that jerk and I was being forced to marry him. Please take me with you and get me out of this place.”

I said, “Come on. Keep up.”

I started sprinting for the jungle on the other side of the clearing from the forked palm tree. The girl followed me. She did her best to keep up. We got out of the village and into the irrigation ditch for a rice paddy. I stopped to listen. I didn’t hear anything. I got out my issue pocket knife, opened the small, sharp blade, and handed it to the girl. She went to work on the white silk and chopped off the decorations and the skirt below her knees. She wrapped the piece of skirt around her waist. I made a “why?” face and the girl whispered, “I might need it later.”

This week I was Max Stein, so I whispered, “I’m Max.”

The girl was obviously Chinese. I thought she had to be about twelve, so I was feeling very good about terminating Comrade Porky.

The girl whispered, “Call me Beth.”

I got out my compass and looked at the direction I wanted to go, then found a ditch that went roughly in that direction. I started crawling that way. Beth kept quiet and followed me. I kept moving as fast as I could while keeping out of sight. I found a patch of bamboo that had grown tall and dense. I helped Beth wiggle into the thicket. We did the best we could to get comfortable and I said, “Sleep if you can. We travel tonight.”

I hadn’t really looked at Beth yet, so I went to sleep quickly. When I woke up it was just before sunset. I helped Beth out of the bamboo thicket. I led her down the ditch until I found an abandoned shack. I showed Beth the privy and told her to do her business there so there wouldn’t be spoor away from an expected location. Tracking dogs were being used to catch Americans on the ground, and I didn’t want to make it any easier for the black hats. There was an old ceramic water barrel and I gave Beth a plastic pan full of water and a sliver of soap I cut off a bar in my pack. It was scentless, but it got the job done.

“Wash after. Don’t use toilet paper or any of your cloth. Nothing they can use to track us,” I said.

I went behind a corner of the decaying farm house and waited. Beth came back from the privy quietly. I went and took care of my business, washed the same way I’d told Beth to do, and then rejoined my hitchhiker. I found a jungle vine that stores water and I cut it carefully so we could drink. I cut off both ends of the remainder of the vine so you couldn’t see where the section we had used had been.

I checked my compass again and picked a different ditch to follow. As we were walking I spotted an abandoned farm that had mango trees in an orchard behind the house. I got ripe mangos for us to eat. I cut slices carefully. Beth frowned at me. I shrugged my shoulders. I knew she probably preferred something god-awful like green mangos with fermented fish flakes or something equally nasty. I grinned at her and said, “We have to eat what’s available.”

I buried the big mango seeds and the peel under the palm leaf thatch. The crumbling house also had a ceramic rain barrel and we washed the mango juice off our hands. I saw some brown elephant ear leaves on the ground and I kicked them over where our wash water had fallen.

There was a full moon and no smog, so it was pretty easy to see where we were going. I moved along just a little slower than I would have if I was alone. Beth kept up. I kept going until just before dawn. I found us a thick patch of raspberry canes that someone had been trying to cultivate. The deserted house did look English inspired. I suspected the house had been abandoned when the occupants fled the advancing Japanese army in WWII. I found the privy which was nearly odorless, it had been unused so long, but I told Beth to use it anyway. I repeated moving off to respect the girl’s modesty. She did her business, I did mine, then I did my best to disguise the fresh scat and blend it into the old, decomposed stuff.

We wiggled into the thicket. I showed Beth how to keep from getting scratched and ripped up by the thorns and how to hide herself and her entry point. I went to sleep.

When we woke up an hour or so before sunset, Beth let me get the leeches off the parts she couldn’t reach and she didn’t give me any modesty shit. She returned the favor and didn’t seem grossed out by my hairy ass.

Just before dark we wriggled out of the thicket, used the privy again, and I repeated my camouflage work. We made good time walking down the ditches in the moonlight. Beth was a good kid and stayed quiet. We found a couple of orchards along the way and got a little fruit for the carbs.

Just before dawn I found another bamboo thicket and we hid out during the day.

Beth was bursting at the seams from keeping quiet for so long. Finally, some of it spilled out as she whispered her story to me.

Beth was the daughter of a Chinese Communist Party Boss. He was a big shot in a big city, but he backed the wrong side in a power play and was sent out to the smallest, poorest village in the most remote province there was. Beth said it was such a shithole that exile was worse punishment than liquidating him.

When her daddy was a big shot, Beth was educated in the best schools in Hong Kong. Shortly after his demotion, her dad was given the honor of donating his daughter to the party. They sent her to marry the agent I killed. She was his reward for keeping the Viet Cong and NVA armed so they could kill “running dog capitalist pigs.”

“Are you married Max?” Beth asked me while we were in a thicket the next day.