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"Don't be a stupid ass, man," Ortega said, almost shouting to be heard over the roar of the howitzers. "I'm not in this alone, but I wouldn't work with a fucking idiot like him." The battery stopped firing leaving a sudden, shocking silence.
Ortega glanced behind him with disgust and lowered his voice to a near whisper. Instead of staring at the barrel of the submachine gun pointed at him, he looked into Ethan's eyes. "Pull that fucking trigger and friends of mine will turn this evidence over to the Provost Marshall in Da Nang. It doesn't matter if I'm dead. Your ass is still mine, man."
Ethan tightened his finger on the trigger. It wouldn't take much pressure to fire. "You're bluffing."
"Do it, man," Ortega said, and rubbed the tip of an index finger along his top row of teeth. "Go ahead. You have all this fucking honesty and integrity to uphold." His bark of laughter was chopped off short at the sound of troops running outside. Once the squad was gone, he said, "The people I work with are all over Southeast Asia. You want fucking power. You want fucking money. Join me and you will have both."
Ortega moved closer to one of the storage racks and placed a hand on the barrel of an M-16. He caressed it as if it were a woman's leg. "If the Army catches you moving the weapons, man, I'll know it before they can get to you. When that time comes, I'll set you up with a warlord in the opium trade in Laos near the Golden Triangle. That will put you hundreds of miles from Vietnam. The fucking Army cannot touch you there. That is a winning deal, man?"
"Fuck you." But Ethan didn't pull the trigger. "Maybe I should take you to the Colonel," he said, "and give him these papers—let him hear what you want me to do."
"That wouldn't be smart, man," Ortega said. "Do that and I'd tell him you caught me going through your files. The fucking rumors are true . I do work for the CIA. Who would they believe? You, a criminal that ran with street gangs in Chicago, or me, a career agent working to preserve democracy throughout the world?"
"I'm not going into business with you."
"Well," Ortega drawled, "there is the matter of a little Viet Cong pussy you've been banging. The way I see it, you love that slant-eyed snatch. The fucking Army will hear about her if anything happens to me or if you decide not to get with the fucking plan. She will look good sitting in that China Beach prison the ARVN keep for prisoners of war. Imagine what those South Vietnamese intelligence agents would do to her to make her talk."
Rage pounded inside of Ethan's skull, and he struggled to keep it under control. His finger twitched against the Greaser's trigger.
The door creaked. Ortega slid into the shadows behind the door and vanished from sight.
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§ “Running with the Enemy” was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction at the 2103 San Francisco Book Festival
§ Discover a new world of Publishing–-the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival Event held on May 18
