pressure from General Chennault, who vowed to bring the matter to the personal attention of his good friend and patron Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself. No one in China ever wanted to get on the wrong side of that ruthless dragon lady, especially on the subject of opium, for not only did she personally detest the Chinese opium habit, she was also a devout, God-fearing Christian with a missionary zeal to stamp out what she referred to as "China's Shame." So Ching Wei was officially court-martialed rather than given the usual slap on the wrist, and to further mollify the U.S. command, they handed him a stiff ten-year sentence in the brig, but needless to say Ching Wei never served a day of it. As I recall, it cost him $10,000 per year to get his sentence reduced to zero, which means he had to cough up a $100,000 bribe—a hell of a bundle in those days.
A few weeks later, a mangled corpse was hauled into town on an oxcart. The peasant who brought it in complained that the body had "fallen from the sky" and landed in his pigsty, killing a pregnant sow. Since the body wore a Chinese uniform, the old farmer had brought it to the Chinese military base in town for disposal—and to demand compensation for his sow. The corpse belonged to Ching Wei's navigator.
Before hurling him to his death, Ching Wei must have forced the navigator to tell him how he'd reported the scam directly to me, because a few days later he confronted me on the street as I walked home from Old Lee's place. Neither my Chinese nor his English were very good back then, so it was almost a comical encounter.
"Why you telling Amelicans me selling opium?" he demanded, barely able to contain his rage. "Now no plane, no business, no face!"
"Forget about face, Ching Wei, yours isn't worth saving." If there's one thing I can't stand about the Chinese, it's their absurd attachment to "face." Here they were, losing their asses in the war, and all they worried about was gaining "face."
My remark made him so furious that he had to switch over to Chinese to express himself. "Puck your mother's stinking cunt!" he shouted for openers, invoking the favorite Chinese curse. "You know perfectly well that half the officers in Chungking play the black market! Why not report them all?"
"The others buy and sell cigarettes, beer, soap, and other things, but they're not depriving dying men and orphans of the food and medicine they need to stay alive." I fished for a Chinese flourish and came up with "Yours is the worst kind of drunk!" I'd meant to say "crime," not "drunk," but the two words are pronounced exactly the same except for the intonation, and I blooped it.
He laughed at that, but not for long. "I should kill you here and now!" he threatened. Ching Wei, like most Chinese, would never face a dangerous adversary alone, so I knew he had a couple of armed goons standing by in the alley.
"Go ahead. If you kill me, the colonel will come after you again, and you know there's no place left to hide in China except Chungking, unless you want to take your chances with the Japs. And if the colonel doesn't get you first, Old Lee will. You know perfectly well that the master does not tolerate fighting among his students."
He'd been smirking, but when I mentioned Old Lee, his face grew dead serious. "The master knows of this?"
"He knows everything. In fact, he saw through you long before the rest of us did."
That clearly upset him. "You filthy bastard of a barnyard sow! I will let you go this time, but remember these words: somewhere, some day, I will find you again, and then we will settle our accounts!" With that parting shot, he spun around on his heels and disappeared down the alley, his henchmen muttering and shuffling behind him.
So that's how I met Ching Wei. When I left Chungking in 1945, I never thought I'd see him again. In fact, I'd completely forgotten about him until that evening at Dragon Mountain. I had no idea how he ended up in Burma, but I intended to find out.
"Did you enjoy the food?" he asked politely as we sipped fragrant jasmine tea. The last dish had just been cleared from the table.
"Excellent! That's the best Chinese food I've had in a long time." That was no lie. Despite my predicament, and with the help of all the good food and drink, I felt great. This would not be the last time I forgot my real situation in Ching Wei's presence.
"Good! Now let us take brandy and cigarettes in the parlor. We have business to discuss."
IV
"You must admit that you never thought you'd see me again. Correct?" Ching Wei swirled his brandy in a hand-cut crystal snifter, savoring the fumes like a cat sniffing the wind. We sat near the latticed windows on lacquered teakwood chairs cushioned with silk. A warm breeze blew the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine trees into the room.
"That's right," I admitted.
"But in recent years I have followed your career with great interest from—as we Chinese say—'behind the curtain.' Obviously, it is your fate to fall into my hands, for Heaven put you directly in my path." He cleared his throat and lit a fresh cigarette. "For your convenience, I will speak in English. I have an excellent English tutor here—a real Englishman—and my command of your language has improved considerably since our last conversation in Chungking.
"As you know, after America defeated Japan, Chiang Kaishek and the entire Nationalist Chinese government moved their capital back to Nanking. Chungking looked like a ghost town after they left. I like the term 'ghost town'; the image is very Chinese. In any case, I moved back to the provincial capital of Szechuan in Chengdu, where I planned to settle down and go into business.
"But when the Communists took Manchuria and wiped out the Nationalist army at Huai-Hai, all of us in the south knew that they would soon come to claim all of China. Our lines of communication and transportation with the last Nationalist strongholds in Nanking and Shanghai were completely cut off, so we could not join them in their final escape to Taiwan. By 1949, the only Nationalist generals still fighting our cause on the mainland were Lee and Duan, who held a small corner of free territory deep in the southwest. As the Communists advanced south, Lee and Duan made preparations to evacuate their men and materials to Burma. As a trained pilot, I was recruited to assist in the evacuation."
"Despite your court-martial?"
Ching Wei laughed. "Come now, Jack, by that time even convicted criminals were dragged from jail and put into uniform. In fact, I was fully reinstated as a captain. By the end of the year, Lee and Duan had established a secure base in the mountains of northern Burma. They were convinced that Chiang Kai-shek would soon launch a counterattack from Taiwan, so they committed their men and arms to daring raids across the border, harassing the Communists at their weakest points. We had eight thousand men when we arrived in Burma, and for years we continued to fight the Communists. In those days, we were still patriots. You may also be interested to hear that our old teacher, Master Lee, joined our march into Burma, and he remained here with us for eight years." That was the first mention of Old Lee I'd heard since the war.
"At first, the Nationalist government in Taiwan supported our campaigns against the Communists in China. For years we received regular deliveries of arms and other supplies from Taiwan. Most of this material was dropped to us by air."
"I know. One of my first assignments for Air America when I arrived in Taipei was to drop supplies into Burma for Lee and Duan. They were big heroes in Taiwan then." Prior to my transfer to Saigon in 1962, I was senior pilot in Taipei for nearly ten years, and I remember very well how popular the Chinese freedom fighters in Burma were in Taiwan in those days.
"How interesting that you were involved in those supply drops! You see, Jack, our fates are indeed entwined. But in 1958, all assistance from Taiwan was suddenly terminated,
