Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks by Alan Coren Read Free Book Online Page B

said, only he had this trick knee, had it since he was a kid, gave him hell.
    On his left side, Kowalski wore a Bowie knife. It was the sort of thing the men appreciated, he knew. It gave him personality, it gave him colour, it placed him in a direct line of descent from Sam Houston and John Mosby and George Custer and Blackjack Pershing. He wanted the men to know that if the Cong ever attempted to overrun the airstrip, he, Kowalski, would be out on the perimeter, meeting them hand-to-hand. ‘Remember the Alamo!’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!’
    He walked out into the bright sun to where his Skyhawks were drawn up, combat-ready, gleaming-white. Bullpup AS missiles hung beneath their wings, slim, deadly, and Zuni launchers fat with 5-in. rockets, and AIM-9 Sidewinders, and plump napalm tanks like great grey footballs. Kowalski watched them through his smoked glasses, trembling with anticipation, feeling himself part of their functional mystery. Kowalski prayed for opportunity.
    He was still there when the morning reconnaissance planes touched down.
    â€˜Nothing,’ said the pilot in the de-briefing room.
    â€˜Nothing?’
    â€˜Looks like it, General.’
    Kowalski flicked again through the blown-up photographs, still moist from the fixing-bath. He stopped suddenly, peered close, cursed the light.
    â€˜What’s that?’
    The pilot squinted.
    â€˜Some guy cutting wheat, I guess.’
    Kowalski straightened up, triumphantly, looked at his assembled staff with bright eyes.
    â€˜Cong wheat!’ he said. ‘For Cong bread.’
    A colonel shrugged.
    â€˜It’s one peasant, General,’ he said.
    â€˜Correction, Colonel! One Cong peasant.’
    â€˜North Vietnamese.’
    â€˜Cong, North Viet, what’s the difference?’ shouted Kowalski. ‘He’s cutting strategic wheat, right? To make strategic bread, right? To feed to Cong, so they got the strength to pull the triggers, right?’
    Twenty minutes later, three Skyhawks roared off north. Sam Kowalski watched their black trails dissolve, willing them on, feeling in his muscles the faint recoil of cannon, seeing the shells stitch dark patterns in the earth.
    Two planes came back.
    â€˜Who knows?’ said the lead pilot. ‘Small arms fire, maybe. I looked around, Harry wasn’t there. Then I see this smoke, coming out of the trees. Maybe he just spun out. Who knows?’
    Kowalski thought of the wreckage, the shattered wings, the dead engine, the wasted bomb-load. The Cong would take the tailplane and put it on a stick and take pictures of it.
    â€˜A million-dollar peasant,’ he said savagely. ‘Did we get him?’
    â€˜He wasn’t there.’
    Kowalski screwed the flight report into a ball.
    â€˜A trap,’ he whispered. ‘A goddam Cong trap!’ He took out his gun and spun the chamber furiously while he thought. Also, he smiled, in a private, military way.
    â€˜Maybe the guy just went for lunch,’ murmured the pilot. But Kowalski did not hear.
    That afternoon, six aircraft took off on a seek-and-destroy mission to knock out the anti-aircraft sites Kowalski had pin-pointed for them. That done, a second strike was to go in and silence the peasant.
    Three bombers returned. The Vietnamese, having found themselves suddenly in a strategic position, had called up a couple of heavy machine-guns to defend their village, both of which had survived the attack that had homed in on the largest building, the school.
    â€˜School, huh?’ said Kowalski, with a certain amount of relief, due to his having originally attributed the smallness of the bodies in the photographs to some fault in his aerial cameras. He turned to his wireless operator. ‘Send this: Major-General Kowalski to USAF HQ – In a pre-emptive strike against major supply dumps north of the DMZ, an A4F Skyhawk was downed by enemy fire. A retaliatory strike