Free Dead and Kicking by Geoffrey McGeachin Page B

all, dragged me clear of the scrum and dumped me outside in the street. My kidneys ached, my right eye was blurry and my cheek felt wet.
    ‘You gotta learn to pick your battles, sunshine,’ the Aussie had said. He knelt down and wiped some blood off my eyebrow with his thumb. ‘See if you can find a local quack to put a couple of stiches in that. I think you’ll live to snap another day and you can tell the ladies the scar’s from a near miss from a commie AK-47. With a story like that, I reckon you’ll be getting your leg over big time.’
    The two men had walked away laughing while I’d sat in the gutter trying to stem the flow of blood with a handkerchief. That scar was the first of many, but like a first kiss or a first love it was the one that stuck in my mind. And now Jack and VT were missing, quite probably dead, and I wanted to know why.
    Logically, the place to start looking was where the chopper had gone down. I wasn’t ready to give up on Jack and VT just yet, not until I saw the bodies. I held on to the thought that they might have survived the crash, even though I knew that was probably a long shot.
    Henk got back a couple of hours later with the news that the visa would be ready first thing in the morning. I was getting gun-shy, literally, about eating in restaurants so I rummaged through Henk’s cupboards and fridge to see what I could come up with for lunch.
    While I sweated down some shallots, garlic and chillies in a wok, I was thinking about Major Peter Cartwright VC. The bloke was supposed to be long dead and gone, and now it appeared that anyone possessing facts to the contrary stood a very good chance of winding up six feet under themselves.

SEVENTEEN
    After collecting my passport and visa, the Dutchman and I made the three-hour road trip from Chiang Rai to Chiang Mai. Henk had suggested I could make the journey on the back of his motorcycle, but I figured I’d already done enough dicing with death in the last few days to last me a lifetime, so we drove.
    A Lao Airlines ATR turboprop was warming up on the tarmac when we arrived at Chiang Mai Airport, ready to take me over the border and into the Lao People’s Democratic Republic where Thai baht and US dollars turned into kip and ‘
sawaddi
’ turned into ‘
sabaai-dii
’ and the smiles just kept on coming.
    The twin-engined ATR has a high wing so the views from the big cabin windows were spectacular. Six thousand metres below us, the wide brown expanse of the mighty Mekong River cut through the countryside on its journey to the delta where we had been filming only a few days before. It was hard to believe that the lush green jungle passing below us was the most heavily bombed piece of real estate on the planet.
    Back in the sixties, while the war in Vietnam was getting all the publicity, a secret war was raging in Laos with the Soviet and North Vietnamese-backed Communist Pathet Lao holding the lowland areas and CIA-backed Lao and Hmong hill tribes occupying mountaintop strongholds that were secretly resupplied by Air America flights. In the meantime, the American Air Force was bombing the crap out of everything that moved in an attempt to stop supplies getting through to the Vietcong via Laos. The Pentagon logged almost 600,000 missions over the country, and given that around 30 per cent of the bombs that were dropped failed to explode and were still lying about, it wasn’t a great place to go wandering off the beaten track.
    As we started our descent, the landscape beneath us began to change. The riverbank was dotted with red-roofed houses and golden temples appeared on the hilltops. As we dipped lower, closer to the airport, bigger buildings and roads busy with traffic filled the view. Then we were thumping down on a runway grimy with black skid marks from hundreds of landings and I was one step closer to finding out what had happened to Jack and VT.
    Any other time Luang Prabang would have been a great place to rest up, but I was in a