Lincoln left them where they were and rushed back to the action, taking a slightly different path so the enemy soldiers wouldn’t see him coming. Most of the other task force soldiers had converged on that area—which made sense, he figured; the enemy’s concentrated effort there probably meant there was something they didn’t want found. The prisoners, most likely.
Lincoln slammed a fresh magazine into his M14 and targeted the man with the RPG launcher. He propped himself against a wall—the two wounds had weakened him more than he wanted to admit, even to himself—and stitched a line of bullets up the soldier’s chest and head. Then he shifted his aim to the right, where another VC was trying to catch the launcher before it fell. As each additional soldier lunged for it, Lincoln picked them off, one by one.
Finally, the last black-pajamaed fighter fell. Lincoln took a quick tally and counted six task force members KIA, including the unfortunate Steinberg. Spearman was still woozy, but Blair was on his feet again, injured but conscious.
The blond CIA agent stepped from the darkness and started toward a concrete bunker behind the fallen Vietnamese. Lincoln was surprised to note that he was carrying an AR-30 but figured it was a souvenir from a soldier he had killed. “Lot of dead commies,” he said. “Does my heart good. But those fucking VC seemed to be trying to keep us away from that,” he said. “Let’s see what’s inside.”
He walked around the bodies, kicking one or two as if checking to ensure that they weren’t faking, until he reached the steel door of the bunker. It opened with a screech that seemed loud enough to wake the dead, but none of those on the ground got up to complain. Inside, he shone a right-angle flashlight for a few moments, then emerged again, a disgusted look on his face.
“What is it?” Kirwan asked.
“It’s not our prisoners. Looks like they were using this shithole of a camp as an opium distribution point.”
“Well, at least we shut that down,” Kirwan said. “That’s something.”
“So’s a case of the clap,” the agent said. “But if it’s not what you went to Saigon for, it doesn’t do you any good. They’re here somewhere, goddamn it. Search every bunker and hooch in this dump.”
The men paired off, Lincoln with the still-shaky Blair, and moved from structure to structure. Finally, someone gave a shout, and the rest of them gathered around what looked like a thatched hut—only the thatching concealed a low-slung concrete structure with a padlocked steel door. Someone on the inside was banging on the door, but from the outside it just sounded like faint, distant thumping.
“Get ’em the fuck out of there,” the agent ordered.
One of the soldiers shot the padlock until it snapped, but it took two of them to muscle open the door. As soon as it was wide enough, a white man crawled out, followed by another. They were both wearing jungle fatigues, but Lincoln could tell right away they weren’t soldiers. The first one tried to gain his feet but couldn’t—he had been in that tiny space for too long, and his legs wouldn’t support him. When a couple of the guys helped him to his feet—and held him there, lest he fall down again—Lincoln realized that he recognized the man’s face.
He couldn’t come up with the name, but he didn’t have to wonder about it for long. Someone else called out, “Hey, that’s Stan Rivers!”
“Stan Rivers, the TV guy?” someone said.
“No shit?” another man added.
When Rivers started to answer, his words came out as a blubbering cry. Lincoln knew it was him, though. Everybody knew Stan Rivers—he was on one of the big nightly news broadcasts from New York, though Lincoln, who’d never watched a lot of TV, couldn’t remember which network.
Everyone knew the man’s name and face, though, and just about everybody who Lincoln knew hated him, too. He liked to call himself “America’s conscience,” and he had a reputation as an insufferable egotist who thought he knew what was best for everybody.
Lincoln remembered the first time he had become aware of the man. An apartment fire in the French Ward had spread to encompass most of a city block, costing dozens of lives. All the network news programs had sent their anchors to the city. While he was there, Rivers had managed to locate a mother who had lost six children and her husband in the blaze. She had clearly not wanted to talk, but he’d pressed her, unwilling to accept her reticence. His cameraman had zoomed in on her face, distraught, tears running down her cheeks and snot bubbling from her nose. Finally, Rivers had put words in her mouth, and she’d acquiesced. “She’s just going along with him to shut him up,” Sammy had said before turning off the TV in disgust. “That bastard will do anything for a story, no matter who gets hurt.”
That phrase—no matter who gets hurt—seemed especially prescient now, with Steinberg and several other Americans dead in an effort to rescue Rivers from someplace he never should have been.
Finally, his face slick with tears, Rivers found his voice. “Thank you, men,” he managed. “I’ve been in that little coffin for days. I thought for sure I’d die there.” He seemed to recall that he wasn’t alone and added, “This is Jimmy Turnbull, my cinematographer. You know who I am.”
“What the fuck are you doing in Laos, Rivers?” the agent said. “You’re supposed to be embedded with a unit in Hue.”
“I heard there were American troops in Laos—which, as you know, is strictly neutral territory. So we broke away from Hue and hitched a ride into Laos. As delighted as we are to see you guys, your being here pretty much confirms the story, doesn’t it?”
“Of course we’re in Laos, dipshit. We came here to fucking rescue you,” the agent pointed out.
“Just the same—we got footage of other Americans in Laos, before we were captured. This is going to be headline news back home. And now it’ll have a human interest angle, too. I suppose our disappearance has been front-page news?”
“Not a soul in the world knows you’re missing,” the agent informed him. “When you vanished, we hushed it up. You’re just damn lucky we got some intel pointing us here.”
Rivers’s face went through a series of expressions—confusion, disappointment, anger, rage—in a matter of seconds. It was obvious he’d wanted to be talked about in his absence, no doubt to make the story of his triumphant return that much bigger.
“But . . . but we—”
“I guess you’re the only one who thinks you’re a big deal,” the agent said. “Not even your wife gave a shit when you vanished.”
“I’m not married. But—”
The agent cut Rivers off again. “Even better. There are already too many grieving widows in the world. Don’t worry—you’ll make your precious headlines soon.”
He didn’t wait for Rivers to respond. Instead, he raised the AR-30 and unloaded most of magazine into the reporter, continuing even after he fell to the earth and lay still. Then he turned to the cameraman, Turnbull.
“What about you, sweet cheeks?” he asked, his tone almost polite but sinister at the same time. “You gonna be a pain in my ass?”
Sweat streamed down the young man’s face, and in the glow from multiple flashlights, Lincoln saw a dark stain spread from Turnbull’s crotch. “I . . . I didn’t see a thing, s-sir,” he said.
“What about that footage Rivers says you got?”
“Th-the VC smashed my camera and threw the film in a fire. Seriously, man, I got nothing. I won’t say shit.”
The agent seemed to consider this for a moment, then bore his gaze into Turnbull’s eyes. “You just bought yourself a pass, kid. But if you change your mind and decide to start talking, just remember—no matter where you go I will fucking find you. And when I do, I’ll make what happened to Rivers look like a goddamn mercy kill compared to what I do to you.”
Tears streaked down Turnbull’s face, and he nodded.
“Tell me you understand.”
“I understand,” Turnbull said.
“Good.” The agent let his gaze slide across the surprised soldiers around him. “Anybody else got a problem?”
The whole world seemed to have slipped into a stunned silence. When nobody answered, the agent said, “Rivers got some of ours killed, all so he could air a story that would damage and humiliate the United States of America,” he said. “If we have troops in Laos—and I’m not saying we do—it’s because we don’t want the country to fall to the fucking communists. It’s a matter of national security, and that bastard would have sold us out for the sake of a goddamn headline. He’d probably have gotten a raise out of it, too.”
“But . . . ,” Kirwan said, “. . . he’s still an American—a celebrity—and you killed him.”
“No, I didn’t,” the agent replied. He held up the weapon, then dropped it. “He was shot with an AR-30. Clearly killed by the NVA. We’ll take his worthless corpse back to Hue and ‘discover’ it in the bush someplace, not far from where he ran away from the American unit he was supposed to be protected by. Everyone knows the jungle’s a dangerous place.”
Lincoln listened with something between outrage and respect tugging at his spirits. He had no reason to like Rivers—Sammy’s hatred of the man had become his own—but the TV anchor was still an American. On the other hand, as the CIA man had said, Rivers was in Laos hoping to cause trouble for the American military. Lincoln was no politician, but he had to believe that those in Washington and at the Pentagon had reasons for what they were doing. If they felt troops were needed to keep Laos free, who was he to argue? And who was Stan Rivers to try to single-handedly overturn that decision? Nobody had elected him commander in chief.
Mostly, Lincoln was impressed by the cool displayed by the agent. He had gunned down an important American TV star without breaking a sweat, a little half-smile playing about his lips as he did it. He had a rational-sounding explanation for it and a plan to cover up the crime. More than that, he had a set of accomplices—each of whom had lost brothers-in-arms—who would back up his story. The men who’d died had done so because of Rivers; nobody was likely to shed a tear for him or to publicly dispute the story that would be told about his death.
He had to hand it to the CIA man—back in New Bordeaux, he could easily become a mob boss. And to Lincoln Clay, that was high praise indeed.