P. O. W. by Donald E. Zlotnik Read Free Book Online Page B

treated black people like shit. The ghetto projects where
     his mother had found them an apartment were new when they moved in, but the whites who controlled everything in Detroit refused
     to give the black people good jobs, and so they were forced to tear the toilets and sinks out of the apartments and sell them
     to feed their families. If a light bulb was screwed into a socket in the hallway, it was gone within minutes. The halls at
     night became a battle zone for muggers and dope dealers.
    Mohammed James ground his teeth as he thought about how the white people treated blacks back home in Detroit. The whites were
     the ones who had forced his mother to work long, eighteen-hour days operating a steam press in a white-owned laundry. She
     had caught pneumonia during his fourteenth winter and died. Mohammed chose to live in the streets, rather than go to the Wayne
     County Youth Home and be forced to feed the emotional vampires who worked there under the protection of the powerful social
     services organization. It was on the streets that he had first met the man who became the most powerful influence in his life:
     Malcolm Pride. James had learned through the popular Black Moslem exactly what his personal calling in life was, and at sixteen
     years of age, James had become the youngest Death Angel in the United States.
    A smile of pride crossed James’s face under the jungle tree. He had known from his first Black Moslem secret ceremony for
     Death Angels what his lifetime vocation was going to be.
    Whites were dumb. He remembered cruising down Highway 75, just south of River Rouge, and picking up white teenagers who were
     running away from home and hitchhiking out to the hippie mecca called California to join communes and fuck all day long. Whites
     were dumb. It was only a matter of persuading them to get into the van, and then there would be a half-dozen of them pushing
     and shoving to choose from. It seemed like every intersection of the highway had a group of hippies waiting for rides. He
     liked the blond ones with the light blue eyes the best. Malcolm had told them that those were the ones who grew up to be the
     worst white devils, and it was best to kill them early, before they could do harm to the pure black folk.
    Whites were dumb. He knew of five white teenagers who would never return to their homes in Detroit from their hippie pilgrimages
     to California; that was the number of whites it took to become a Death Angel.
    Yes, when Malcolm Pride had entered James’s life, everything had taken its proper place, and he became very useful to someone.
     What Mohammed James had never realized, and probably never would, was that his great friend Malcolm Pride had seen in him
     what even the most incompetent psychologist would have instantly detected: that here was a psychopathic killer who, even had
     he lived in all-black Africa, would still have killed for pleasure. Knowing this, Malcolm channeled the hate to white people
     and gave James a cause and a reason to kill by being a Death Angel for the Moslem movement.
    The NVA officer spoke sharply now to his junior leaders, and the company started preparing to move out of their break site.
     There was a noticeable difference in the way the soldiers acted. The lackadaisical attitude of the troops was gone. The soldiers,
     who had been carrying their weapons by their barrels over their shoulders, now carried the weapons at the ready. James knew
     they were crossing into South Vietnam’s A Shau Valley. Lieutenant Van Pao had briefed him before he left the POW camp that
     an American battalion had moved into the A Shau, and she was almost sure that it was a unit from the First Cavalry Division,
     his old outfit.
    Mohammed James took his position ten meters out in front of the NVA point element and began earning his keep.
    Corporal Barnett lay in the bamboo cage where the guards had left him. He barely moved, and when he did, a groan escaped his
     throat. The bottoms of