Slash and Burn by Colin Cotterill Page A

Nobody was missing.”
    “And where is she now?” asked Civilai. “I didn’t notice any strange Lao in the breakfast room.”
    Peach asked the major who laughed and got clumsily to his feet, nonchalantly back-heeling the crate under the bed as he did so. He put his arm around Civilai and led him to the window. He’d obviously missed the cultural sensitivity day at orientation. He pulled the flimsy curtain aside and pointed to a spot way beyond the back fence almost twenty meters into the no-go area. There on a deckchair in a one-piece orange bathing suit was a rotund woman in dark glasses and a sunhat. All this, irrespective of the fact that the morning sun had barely made a crack in the early mist.
    “What on earth…?” said Commander Lit. “None of that land out there has been cleared of unexploded ordnance. Didn’t she see the signs? What’s she playing at? Is she mad? Who is she?”
    But the other Lao in the group knew only too well who had followed them to Xiang Khouang, and it wasn’t a she .
    Auntie Bpoo was as common a figure around the downtown area of Vientiane as Eros was to London and Jesus to Rio. A man, most certainly; deep voiced and pot-bellied and solid as a wad of sticky rice, but a slave to cross-dressing. He read palms and predicted the future on street corners and fooled nobody with his zebra-striped tank tops and lime green hotpants. But put him in a silk suit, plaster him in make-up and stick a permed wig on his head and he might just fool a helicopter full of Americans. Because that’s what had happened.
    Far from being angry, Siri was impressed that the fortune-teller had been able to pull it off. The doctor hadn’t an inkling that Auntie Bpoo spoke English, but that didn’t surprise him either. He, she—and she preferred to be called “she”—was a remarkable … woman. Although she pretended that her soothsaying was a scam, that she just wanted an excuse to sit and talk to people, to make friends and be accepted in Lao society, Siri knew for a fact that she had an uncanny gift. Tangled deep in her quirkiness and her unfathomable poems and her mood and gender swings, was a person who actually could see the future. Siri needed someone like her to help explain his own untrained connection to the spirit world. Yet so far she’d played dumb. He wondered whether, here in the wilds of Phonsavan with no escape, he just might be able to get some sense out of her. All that could come later. For now they had to convince her to put on something respectable and take a ride with them to Spook City.

8
    SPOOK CITY
    The two choppers were nearing Long Cheng. They’d just flown over Sam Thong, ten minutes to the north. It was deserted now but in the early seventies it had housed 150,000 refugees. The US would fly journalists there to view the USAID humanitarian program. They wanted the world to see what a solid job they were doing to help the masses of poor people displaced by the fighting—fleeing the Pathet Lao, they called it. What the administrators didn’t mention was that the refugees were actually fleeing US bombing. Entire areas were evacuated so the CIA’s Hmong fighters had an empty playing field for combat. Chased from their homes, all these displaced people had become dependent on US airdrops. Another thing the journalists didn’t know was that a few kilometers over the ridge was the real war effort, the launch pad for the forward air arm leading up to a thousand sorties a day—Long Cheng.
    The choppers crossed over a saddleback mountain and were careering down into the Long Cheng valley. The highlight of the macadam airfield was a drastic limestone karst at the end of the runway. Fliers called it the vertical airbrake because if you overshot, it was a most effective method of slowing down, albeit terminal. Many of the surrounding huts had been stripped of their tin roofs, and bamboo shacks, victims of neglect, extended far up into the surrounding hills. But there were signs of