Lincoln was barely conscious of the ride.
For one thing, he was dead tired—he’d been going nonstop since Captain Franklin had come to see him at Lang Vei. Most of the other guys, those who still drew breath, were sleeping as soundly as if they were dead. But for as exhausted as he was, Lincoln couldn’t sleep. He kept turning Donovan’s offer over and over in his mind, as if it were a physical thing he could pick up and examine.
He had so many questions. Could he tell anyone he was going to Laos, to live and work with the Hmong? It was surely a highly classified mission. He didn’t like the idea of being out there, alone, with Sammy and Ellis not knowing where he was and what he was doing. Sammy was counting on him to come home as soon as he could, not to go native someplace he wasn’t even legally supposed to be. What if something happened to him there? Would the government find his body and send him home, or would it pretend it had no idea what had happened to him? Or like Stan Rivers, would they make up a lie to explain his death? If he were captured, would he—again, like Rivers—be murdered by his own government, to avoid embarrassment?
He didn’t speak Laotian, or Hmong, or whatever it was those people spoke. He barely knew any Vietnamese. Did the Hmong tribesmen know English? How could they? He just couldn’t picture himself on his own in the Laotian wilderness, responsible for turning what he assumed was a bunch of primitive people—hardly advanced from the Stone Age, from the sound of it—into a fighting force capable of taking on well-trained North Vietnamese soldiers equipped with the best matériel that China and the Soviets could provide.
It was insane. He couldn’t possibly do that job.
He had questions but no one to ask. Donovan was once again sitting in front, next to the pilot. Lincoln was strapped into a seat in the rear of the craft, sitting on his flak jacket to protect himself against small-arms fire from below. Donovan had made it clear that he wanted an answer, not more conversation, when they landed at Danang. And by taking him aside for the conversation, he’d demonstrated that the topic was not to be broached with the other guys.
No, Lincoln was alone on this one. He had to make the call, and he had to do it with incomplete information.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time. “Alone” was commonplace for a man who’d been abandoned by his mother as a toddler, who had never known his real father. That role had been filled for him by Father James, and then Sammy, but as hard as they tried—and they were both good men, he thought, flawed but well meaning—they both had other obligations as well. Lincoln was just one of dozens of kids at the orphanage, and by necessity, Father James and the sisters had to pay most attention to the troublemakers.
Lincoln Clay had learned early on that if he didn’t want to be harassed by the orphanage staff, all he had to do was behave inside its walls and save his hell-raising for outside. If a kid gave him trouble, he didn’t strike back immediately. He swallowed his anger, and then when he caught the kid away from the grounds and the staff, he made a point of reminding his opponent what transgression he’d committed—right before beating the crap out of him.
He had lost a few battles, too, early on. But it wasn’t long before he grew bigger than most of the other orphans, and stronger. And the beatdowns he took taught him how to fight, showed him what he was doing wrong. More crucially, they taught him that physical pain was fleeting compared to emotional pain. Humiliation lasted a long time, but a bruise faded in a few days.
Father James had been good to him. He and the sisters had fed Lincoln, put a roof over his head, gave him clothes, and taught him. But Lincoln had always held back some of himself. How he processed those things, how he dealt with them internally, was all on him. And he had been fine with it. After the adoption, it was years before he learned to trust his new family. Even now, although he would take difficult decisions to Sammy and Ellis for input, he ultimately made up his own mind.
He would do the same here. Instead of dwelling any further on the unknowable, he looked outside, watching Vietnam’s improbably green landscape whipping past. When Donovan asked the question, he would have an answer.
• • •
The helicopters touched down at the busy air base late in the afternoon. Lincoln still hadn’t slept, and the scene on the tarmac seemed to take on a surreal quality. Soldiers in olive drab or jungle fatigues rushed this way and that, everyone in a hurry but very few seeming to actually do anything. Enormous howitzers stood at one end of the airfield, like giant insects with their necks craned to catch the last rays of the sun, as wasp-like choppers circled. Airplanes landed and others took off. It was a war zone without a war. People came and went, but what was the point of all the hurly-burly motion?
Then he saw Donovan strolling toward him, the one man who didn’t seem rushed or anxious. He had a lit cigarette in his mouth and had somehow come up with a light linen blazer that he carried over his shoulder, like a tourist looking for beignets in the French Ward.
He stopped in front of Lincoln and nodded over his shoulder. “There’s a truck back there, on its way to Lang Vei,” he said. “You can get on it, if you want. Or not. Your choice.”
“If I skip the truck, then what?”
“Then you’ll grab a bunk here, and in a few days you’ll start your new life.”
Lincoln hesitated. “New life” made it feel like a big change. He had already known it would be. When he’d been issued his Green Beret, that had seemed like a new life in itself—instead of being just one more grunt, he had become a special breed of elite soldier. Now, Donovan was offering him a different path, an elevation in status that seemed meteoric compared to his expectations when he had enlisted. The only person in Lincoln’s life who wouldn’t be surprised would be Sammy, who had always insisted that Lincoln was destined for greatness, one way or another.
He didn’t know if he would even be able to tell his family. Again, so much he didn’t know.
And Donovan stood there, tapping ash off his butt, waiting for an answer.
“You said I had until tomorrow morning.”
“You believe everything you hear?”
“I’ll grab a bunk,” Lincoln said.
“That’s what I wanted to hear. Come on, I’ll make sure you get the best bunk this shithole has to offer.”
• • •
Lincoln could have gone into Danang, just a short ride up a paved road from the air base. But some of the guys he met told him that it was a sleepy little ville, nothing compared to Saigon. He was surprised. It was a beautiful setting, on the Danang Bay with the South China Sea just beyond it, and the Marble Mountains rising behind. In the United States, it would have been a resort area packed with fancy hotels.
Instead, he sat on the beach, read a paperback book someone else had abandoned, and swam in the warm waters of the bay. He ran on the white sand and worked out in the makeshift gym set up at the base. He ate at the mess with the rest of the grunts. Even though he didn’t know them, he couldn’t help feeling some of the camaraderie of men in uniform, men with a common purpose. Looking around, he couldn’t know which ones would be dead in a month or a year, but some would. They were all aware of it, too. That knowledge of impending danger—like the uniforms, like the training—drew them together.
The feeling was familiar to him. The Black Mob back in New Bordeaux was much the same. The city had numerous crime organizations—Sal Marcano’s family first among equals—and tensions often ran high. Law enforcement was another constant thorn. Those two forces drove the men of any given gang together. And men they were; there were always women, but for the most part they were on the periphery, wives and girlfriends who took care of the home front. Having been raised in that environment, the sense of soldiers at war was a kind of homecoming.
But that camaraderie was short-term, for him. He had agreed to leave this all behind—the Army, Vietnam, the forced bonding of men under fire—and instead would be alone in a different country, with foreigners of a kind he had never met. He couldn’t quite picture what it would entail, what conditions would be like, how he would live and work with those strangers. And once again, there was no one to ask. Before he’d left, Donovan had made clear that Lincoln was to talk to no one about his new assignment. If men wondered why he was just hanging around the air base, he was to make something up or put them off.
As it was, nobody asked. There were whole companies hanging around Danang, not sure of where they were headed or what it would be like when they got there. One man in that boat didn’t raise any eyebrows.
Still, he was getting impatient. Sitting still wasn’t his style. When Donovan showed up again, four days later, Lincoln was more than ready.