Black Market

There was a pause as he was put on hold-three or four minutes, which seemed even longer.

“Billie's not on her beeper, love. She doesn't seem to be available right now. You could meet one of our other escorts. They're all very beautiful. Former and part-time models and actresses, David.”

David Hudson hung up. He felt disappointed, unsatisfied, and empty in a cold, gnawing way… Maybe he couldn't handle this right now. Maybe he shouldn't ever try to see Billie Bogan again.

The idea of blowing Green Band over some English whore-it almost made him laugh. It would indeed be ludicrously fu

Deception, Hudson remembered. The very begi

La Hoc Noh Prison, North Vietnam

Captain David Hudson's tortured one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound frame slumped forward like that of a barroom drunk. The fragile shell of his body threatened to shatter into pieces, to finally collapse in exhaustion or perhaps death. Hudson 's mind screamed for him to give up this useless fight.

What remained of his body was racked by excruciating pain, intense suffering that would have been unthinkable before the last eleven months in North Vietnamese prison camps. He was trying unsuccessfully to put his mind somewhere else now. He ached to be outside the seething bamboo hut, somewhere safe and relatively sane in his past, even as far back as his Kansas boyhood.

He'd been trained to resist interrogation and enemy brainwashing. “Sisyphus” the program was called at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

He remembered that now. Sisyphus had supposedly prepared him for enemy interrogation-or so the army instructors had told him.

You must put your mind in another place altogether.

It had sounded so simple, so coldly logical. Now it seemed highly unlikely and absurd, infuriating in its stupidity and typical American arrogance. Sisyphus had been yet another cruel fraud invented by the United States Army…

The Lizard Man, the obdurate North Vietnamese commandant of La Hoc Noh, raised a white stone game marker and decisively put one of Hudson 's black stones in check.

There was a hard clack of the playing piece against the highly polished teak board.

The North Vietnamese prison guards, all dressed in muddy black pajamas, tipped homemade rice wine from long-necked green bottles. They snorted out ridiculing laughter at this obvious mismatch of competitors.

The camp commandant was frightening, swift, sure of his game moves. He was on a different skill level, Hudson understood that.

According to the strict rules of Go, the game should have been played with a sizable handicap called okigo. Should have been… But strict adherence to rules meant nothing here.

“Yow play!” the Lizard Man once again screeched. “Yow play now!”

He wanted his victory now-the cruel bloodletting, the slow death for the loser in the festering jungle swamps just beyond the prison camp.

The guards were physical extensions of their leader's personality. They, too, became impatient now, grumbling and growling for faster action, like spectators at a cockfight who weren't getting the fix of swift, bloody action they needed.

Clack!

David Hudson finally made a ridiculous, arbitrary move on the game board. He smiled crookedly at the commandant, as if he'd suddenly turned the game in his favor.

“You play!” Hudson snapped. He knew the smile on his face was hopelessly spacey, but he savored the small moment of triumph.

The Lizard Man was momentarily confused, clearly so. Then he howled shrill, birdlike laughter.

The Vietnamese soldiers howled high-pitched laughter as well. They inched even closer to the two players as the commandant made a surprisingly conservative move with one of his white stones.

Disappointment immediately etched itself across the soldiers' faces. Here was uncertainty for the first time. David Hudson was amazed at the commandant's sudden hesitation.

“Yow!” Lizard Man screamed. “Fast play! Yow play riii now!”

“Fuck you, asshole… Watch this one.”

A faint smile, hollow and incomprehensible, slipped across David Hudson's blistered white lips. Once again he made a bizarre and seemingly pointless and foolish game move.

“You play!” he said in a barely audible whisper. “You play fast, too.”

The Lizard Man squinted and studied the exquisite, highly reflective teak board more closely. He gazed into Hudson 's bloodshot eyes, then looked down again at the Go board.

The North Vietnamese guards crushed in closer.

This was getting better, much more dramatic, finally. A real game was starting to develop.

The soldiers began to whisper conspiratorially among themselves. They were like the professional gamblers, the unsavory flotsam always crowded into the fan-tan parlors of Saigon.

Something interesting and very curious was happening in the game now. Even the wily camp commandant was confused, troubled for the moment by his American opponent, by his seemingly unfathomable moves.

For the first time, one of the prison guards offered a side bet on the American soldier. The commandant threw the soldier a threatening glance.

Suddenly, then, so smoothly and so coolly, as if he were performing an ordinary movement such as lighting a cigarette, Captain David Hudson removed the revolver from one of the Vietnamese soldiers' loosely dangling holsters.

Hudson swiveled back to face the hated Lizard Man.

Once again, the faint half-crazed smile crossed David Hudson's blistered lips. “Fucker. Miserable shit fucker.”

A heartbeat later, the revolver thundered.

It was like an army field ca

The commandant's small head flew back. Bone cracked hard against the wooden wall's main support post. The commandant's military hat sailed away, saucer style, across the smoking hut.

A dark hole gushed in the Vietnamese officer's forehead. The Lizard Man's mouth dropped open, to show broken, ugly yellow teeth. A lathering, pale white tongue flopped out.

David Hudson reflexively fired the service revolver a second time. And a third time. He felt like a confused child-playing with a toy gun. Bang, bang, bang.

He thrust the point of the revolver directly into the frozen wide eyes of a guard. The man's face shattered like delicate pottery. Skull, flesh, bone, flew apart.

He shot another guard in the throat.

The two remaining guards had dropped their near empty liquor bottles; they were struggling frantically to get out their holstered revolvers.

The next three deafening gunshots tore through a chest, pierced the other's stomach, then his heart. The foul-smelling, boiling jungle hut was suddenly a bloody, smoking abattoir.

Shakily, David Hudson ran outside the command hut. He was limping badly, as if his legs belonged to someone else. He stumbled, scrambled forward, on the unfamiliar, unsteady supports. His legs were like wooden stilts.

Every object he saw now seemed part of a blurred, impossible dream. Everywhere he looked, there was harsh unreality. A late afternoon sun flared orange and bright red over the dense wall of jungle green. Screeching monkeys skittered away. Insects buzzed angrily between the trees.

The humidity, stifling, choking, filled his lungs. He thought he would surely drown in the moist weight of this awful air.

Machine-gun fire suddenly erupted from a bamboo guard post overhead, a control post that subtly blended into the dark green of the jungle.

David Hudson awkwardly weaved back and forth across the exposed exercise yard. Prisoners cheered from their locked cells, their bamboo animal cages.