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Excerpt from RED DREAM


River Rats and Foxes (Book 1, Chapter 5)

A sacred respect is due the person of the sovereign. He is the mediator between the people and heaven as he celebrates the national cult.

— Ngo Dinh Diem

Saigon: November 1957

The headquarters of Big Boss, Saigon's organized crime lord, sat decaying at the foot of an abandoned wharf. The musky Saigon River oozed in the sunlight, creating a hothouse stench. The sun's rays bounced off the tangle of pistols and rifles in the ammunition dump. The arsenal was comprised of Japanese automatics that fired 8 mm Nambu rounds; Russian Tokarev pistols; and some old Mauser rifles. Many of the weapons had been used in the Chinese army; others were standard Russian issue. A mound of grenades lay beside the guns.

The street that led to the wharf was deserted. Chou had maneuvered his Renault in low gear, avoiding puddles he knew would bottom out under the brackish water. Chou wished he had his Citroën halftrack. He'd gotten good use from its unusual four-wheel drive fitted with two rear wheels that rotated like a Caterpillar tractor. Chou had been forced to abandon the vehicle months before. It had been up to fender level in the jungle's squelching mud when he'd been unable to ferret out one of the few remaining Moïs, the bow-and-arrow tribe that refused to submit to any authority and were once believed by city folk to have tails.

Here, at Big Boss's riverine headquarters, it had rained long and hard. Stopping the Renault directly in front of the gate, Chou removed his revolver from the glove box, made sure it was loaded, and stuffed it down his silk sock. "Hello!" he called out. "I'm here to see Big Boss."

Two ugly youths appeared. Each carried a Mauser rifle. The boys had rolled up their sacking shirts to cool their stomachs. They were streaked with mud and reeked of sweat. Even their mothers referred to them as river rats. The taller youth was all skin and bones. He leaned against the paddled handle of his weapon, the odd-looking C-96 7.63 mm Parabellum Broomhandle rifle used by the Communists during the first year of the Korean War. The other boy had a stomach girdled by an adolescent ring of fat. One chubby finger curled around the ring attached to the more manageable and shorter handle of his Schnellfeuerpistole, which he twirled like a baton. His plaything had been made for the military in China. Both weapons boasted twenty-round magazines.

Beckoning to the guards, Chou handed each a Babe Ruth chocolate bar. There were genial smiles all around. After a perfunctory body search that stopped at his knees, Chou was led to the back of the derelict building.

Big Boss sat at a metal desk built large and heavy. A Tintin comic book lay on his desk; it was popular reading in South Vietnam as well as in France. Big Boss, whom even Chou didn't know the real name of, reclined in a scoop-necked undershirt and a lunghi, the roomy wraparound skirt worn by men in India. The chair on rollers was designed to take his substantial weight, and the lunghi was specially fitted with deep pockets on the inside panels. "So, Little Fox, how does the CIA and army-backed coup fare against our haughty presidential family?" he rumbled, feigning disinterest. Chou was known to his comrades and cronies as Con Cáo Con, or Little Fox. Like his namesake, he was secretive and sinewy.

"We may soon taste the sweetness of revenge," Chou said. "The brave South Vietnamese paratrooper units are bombing their own."

Before the lawyer could say anything else, the shrill ring of the phone cut him off. Big Boss scooped up the receiver in his fat hand. After a lengthy exchange studded with profanities, he hung up. "That was the brilliantly conniving Dr. Tuyen."

Chou had admired Tuyen once but had reversed his opinion since Tuyen's appointment as the Ngo family's secret-service head. So he made no comment but curled his lips in disdain. Under Nhu's orders Tuyen had run most of Big Boss's men out of town. The chief spy was no friend to the crime lord.

"Are you deaf, Chou? That was Dr. Tuyen. He's offered a reward if we can throw a wrench into the army's coup."

Chou raised a black eyebrow and held it there.

The lawyer's calm drove Big Boss's blood pressure up, and his words tumbled out as quickly as a cyclo driver on the way home to dinner. "Tuyen needs our help. Without it the Ngo family will fall. Tuyen tells me the Presidential Palace is surrounded and communication are cut off. Diem can't get word to General Khanh and his loyal Mekong Delta troop, which is on alert in case an officers' coup gets this far. But Khanh won't march to Diemaid unless he receives direct written orders signed and sealed by the president himself. And Diem can't get anything past his own palace door." Big Boss took a deep breath. When he exhaled, his stomach rolled in waves over the folds of his lunghi. "Tuyen has asked us to intervene."

"And why would we do that?" Chou muttered.

"For financial gain and exchange of favors — what else?" Big Boss looked aghast at Chou's question. "We're assured by Tuyen that Diem, the self-righteous pig, and his bloodsucking brother, Nhu, will be history, anyway — and soon enough. It's for our benefit, and not only Uncle Ho's, that we're not rid of the Ngo family just yet."

Finally Chou was intrigued. "How great is the reward for us to change horses in midstream?"

"Pretty good. They'll make it well worth a quick change in our loyalties. Money can buy an entrance to any country in the world, and I'm on my way out soon, anyway. Really, my friend, what's loyalty cost for people like you and me? Our skins come first and then piastres as insurance for our skins."

"How much?"

"Fifty million piastres each, and straight into a Swiss bank account. That's enough for us to think of a plan to save them this time, eh, Chou?" Big Boss pushed his chair back from the desk and leaned, the momentum propelling him forward to a standing position. His face beaded with the effort, rivulets of perspiration running down his forehead and neck. He dabbed daintily with a handkerchief and returned it to a deep pocket. His undershirt puddled even below the cutaway armpits and at the chest. As he moved, his contagion of sweat spread.

Big Boss rolled like a rowboat in a storm as his dimpled bare feet padded across the floor. A rat, brown coat gleaming, scrutinized his landlord's rollicking progress from a filthy corner. Chou went ahead, and the two men emerged into the sunlit yard, the river air putrid and thick in the lawyer's nostrils. Big Boss called two of his gangsters who had been squatting on the rough ground watching a game of boules, the French version of bowls. They smoked hand-rolled Gitanes.

"You!" the gangster leader barked to one of the hoods. "Get together a company of our best men and make sure Dr. Tuyen's house is safe. Be sure to go one at a time, so you don't attract attention."

"Yes, sir," the man answered, a cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Big Boss glanced at a third sharp-looking thug who leaned against an open box of grenades as if it were the backrest of his personal chaise longue. He was waiting his turn at boules. The gang leader instructed him to go to Thanh's rubber stamp shop at boulevard Charner and ask the proprietor to bring himself and his seal-making tools immediately to headquarters. "Tell the seal maker he'll be generously rewarded." Behind Big Boss's flesh-choked eyes the beads to a mental abacus calculated the seal maker's cut — it would be a pittance.

He eyed Chou. "My latest acquisition." He withdrew a custom-made .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson from the double leather holster rig accessible beneath the folds of his Indian-style skirt, then waved it at the lawyer. "The Americans hunt grizzly bears and their lawmen hunt human flesh with this." Big Boss guffawed, then produced a second Magnum with a shorter barrel from the endless mass of material ringing his hips. The cloth Hula-Hoop below his waist was a veritable gun cache. "FBI," he proclaimed, releasing a belch. "J. Edgar Hoover's personal weapon. This one's yours, my friend." Big Boss handed the short-barreled handgun to Chou. "A gift, no strings. For your collection."

Chou smiled and closed his hand around the Magnum, pointing it toward the men playing boules. Arm outstretched and legs planted firmly, he aimed and pulled the trigger. Bing - a silver-tipped hollowpoint drilled a wormhole in the metal disk rolling across the uneven ground. The man who had held the disk a second earlier scowled at Chou.

Big Boss howled. "Good shot! Too bad you didn't hit Co. He's pretty useless as it is."

Chou tucked his gift into the empty holster rig that lay flat against his bare chest, and the two men embraced, clapping each other on the back and chortling with pleasure.

*

Nightfall came like a wraith seducing the city. Saigon was overrun by carpetbaggers and touts circling the streets, picking fights, bickering, waiting. Confusion was paramount. Saigon was no longer the sophisticated metropolis of boulevards dappled with tamarind petals and busy with honest street merchants shining shoes and practicing the ancient arts of fortune-telling and ear-cleaning. The city was the Pearl of the Orient no more. It had degenerated into ignoble anguish, reinventing itself as the Peril of Southeast Asia.

But before the bloody tones of sunset mirrored their beautiful blaze on the river, before the purple neon of the bars turned Saigon's streets and alleys into a carnival of corruption, Chou and Big Boss successfully counterfeited a suitable message from Diem to the leader of the Mekong Delta troops, ordering them to save the Presidential Palace.

By the dinner hour, Big Boss and Chou had sent the bogus message to Tuyen. Wasting no time, the spy chief went into action to save his bosses and benefactors: Diem, Nhu, and the deliciously malevolent Madame Nhu, who wouldn't have needed saving if she'd flown to Paris to purchase a strip club on the Champs-Elysées as she had planned.

Joined by a handful of Tuyen's best secret-service men, Big Boss's handpicked ruffians piled into a cavalcade of Mercedes sedans and headed out on their mission to save Diem's faltering dynasty. The rescue message would be safely delivered to the loyal Mekong Delta troops within hours.

Author signed copies of Red Dream are available for purchase at www.RedDream.info. Or ask at your local bookstore.

"Are you deaf, Chou? That was Dr. Tuyen. He's offered a reward if we can throw a wrench into the army's coup."

Chou raised a black eyebrow and held it there.

The lawyer's calm drove Big Boss's blood pressure up, and his words tumbled out as quickly as a cyclo driver on the way home to dinner. "Tuyen needs our help. Without it the Ngo family will fall. Tuyen tells me the Presidential Palace is surrounded and communication are cut off. Diem can't get word to General Khanh and his loyal Mekong Delta troop, which is on alert in case an officers' coup gets this far. But Khanh won't march to Diemaid unless he receives direct written orders signed and sealed by the president himself. And Diem can't get anything past his own palace door." Big Boss took a deep breath. When he exhaled, his stomach rolled in waves over the folds of his lunghi. "Tuyen has asked us to intervene."

"And why would we do that?" Chou muttered.

"For financial gain and exchange of favors — what else?" Big Boss looked aghast at Chou's question. "We're assured by Tuyen that Diem, the self-righteous pig, and his bloodsucking brother, Nhu, will be history, anyway — and soon enough. It's for our benefit, and not only Uncle Ho's, that we're not rid of the Ngo family just yet."

Finally Chou was intrigued. "How great is the reward for us to change horses in midstream?"

"Pretty good. They'll make it well worth a quick change in our loyalties. Money can buy an entrance to any country in the world, and I'm on my way out soon, anyway. Really, my friend, what's loyalty cost for people like you and me? Our skins come first and then piastres as insurance for our skins."

"How much?"

"Fifty million piastres each, and straight into a Swiss bank account. That's enough for us to think of a plan to save them this time, eh, Chou?" Big Boss pushed his chair back from the desk and leaned, the momentum propelling him forward to a standing position. His face beaded with the effort, rivulets of perspiration running down his forehead and neck. He dabbed daintily with a handkerchief and returned it to a deep pocket. His undershirt puddled even below the cutaway armpits and at the chest. As he moved, his contagion of sweat spread.

Big Boss rolled like a rowboat in a storm as his dimpled bare feet padded across the floor. A rat, brown coat gleaming, scrutinized his landlord's rollicking progress from a filthy corner. Chou went ahead, and the two men emerged into the sunlit yard, the river air putrid and thick in the lawyer's nostrils. Big Boss called two of his gangsters who had been squatting on the rough ground watching a game of boules, the French version of bowls. They smoked hand-rolled Gitanes.

"You!" the gangster leader barked to one of the hoods. "Get together a company of our best men and make sure Dr. Tuyen's house is safe. Be sure to go one at a time, so you don't attract attention."

"Yes, sir," the man answered, a cigarette clenched between his teeth.

Big Boss glanced at a third sharp-looking thug who leaned against an open box of grenades as if it were the backrest of his personal chaise longue. He was waiting his turn at boules. The gang leader instructed him to go to Thanh's rubber stamp shop at boulevard Charner and ask the proprietor to bring himself and his seal-making tools immediately to headquarters. "Tell the seal maker he'll be generously rewarded." Behind Big Boss's flesh-choked eyes the beads to a mental abacus calculated the seal maker's cut — it would be a pittance.

He eyed Chou. "My latest acquisition." He withdrew a custom-made .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson from the double leather holster rig accessible beneath the folds of his Indian-style skirt, then waved it at the lawyer. "The Americans hunt grizzly bears and their lawmen hunt human flesh with this." Big Boss guffawed, then produced a second Magnum with a shorter barrel from the endless mass of material ringing his hips. The cloth Hula-Hoop below his waist was a veritable gun cache. "FBI," he proclaimed, releasing a belch. "J. Edgar Hoover's personal weapon. This one's yours, my friend." Big Boss handed the short-barreled handgun to Chou. "A gift, no strings. For your collection."

Chou smiled and closed his hand around the Magnum, pointing it toward the men playing boules. Arm outstretched and legs planted firmly, he aimed and pulled the trigger. Bing - a silver-tipped hollowpoint drilled a wormhole in the metal disk rolling across the uneven ground. The man who had held the disk a second earlier scowled at Chou.

Big Boss howled. "Good shot! Too bad you didn't hit Co. He's pretty useless as it is."

Chou tucked his gift into the empty holster rig that lay flat against his bare chest, and the two men embraced, clapping each other on the back and chortling with pleasure.

*

Nightfall came like a wraith seducing the city. Saigon was overrun by carpetbaggers and touts circling the streets, picking fights, bickering, waiting. Confusion was paramount. Saigon was no longer the sophisticated metropolis of boulevards dappled with tamarind petals and busy with honest street merchants shining shoes and practicing the ancient arts of fortune-telling and ear-cleaning. The city was the Pearl of the Orient no more. It had degenerated into ignoble anguish, reinventing itself as the Peril of Southeast Asia.

But before the bloody tones of sunset mirrored their beautiful blaze on the river, before the purple neon of the bars turned Saigon's streets and alleys into a carnival of corruption, Chou and Big Boss successfully counterfeited a suitable message from Diem to the leader of the Mekong Delta troops, ordering them to save the Presidential Palace.

By the dinner hour, Big Boss and Chou had sent the bogus message to Tuyen. Wasting no time, the spy chief went into action to save his bosses and benefactors: Diem, Nhu, and the deliciously malevolent Madame Nhu, who wouldn't have needed saving if she'd flown to Paris to purchase a strip club on the Champs-Elysées as she had planned.

Joined by a handful of Tuyen's best secret-service men, Big Boss's handpicked ruffians piled into a cavalcade of Mercedes sedans and headed out on their mission to save Diem's faltering dynasty. The rescue message would be safely delivered to the loyal Mekong Delta troops within hours.

Author signed copies of Red Dream are available for purchase at www.RedDream.info. Or ask at your local bookstore.