22
Titles
Grishanov was in the embassy. Hanoi was a strange city, a mixture of French-Imperial architecture, little yellow people and bomb craters. Traveling about a country at war was an unusual exercise, all the more so in an automobile daubed with camouflage paint. A passing American fighter-bomber coming back from a mission with an extra bomb or some unexpended 20-millimeter cannon rounds could easily use the car for practice, though they never seemed to do so. The luck of the draw made this a cloudy, stormy day, and air activity was at a minimum, allowing him to relax, but not to enjoy the ride. Too many bridges were down, too many roads cratered, and the trip lasted three times what ought to have been the norm. A helicopter trip would have been much faster, but would also have been madness. The Americans seemed to live under the fiction that an automobile might be civilian-owned—this in a country where a bicycle was a status symbol! Grishanov marveled—but a helicopter was an aircraft, and killing one was a kill. Now in Hanoi, he got the chance to sit in a concrete building where the electricity was a sometime thing—off at the moment—and air conditioning an absurd fantasy. The open windows and poorly fitting screens allowed insects freer reign than the people who worked and sweated here. For all that, it was worth the trip to be here in his country’s embassy, where he could speak his native tongue and for a precious few hours stop being a semidiplomat.
“So?” his general asked.
“It goes well, but I must have more people. This is too much for one man to do alone.”
“That is not possible.” The General poured his guest a glass of mineral water. The principal mineral present was salt. The Russians drank a lot of that here. “Nikolay Yevgeniyevich, they’re being difficult again.”
“Comrade General, I know that I am only a fighter pilot and not a political theorist. I know that our fraternal socialist allies are on the front line of the conflict between Marxism-Leninism and the reactionary Capitalist West. I know that this war of national liberation is a vital part of our struggle to liberate the world from oppression—”
“Yes, Kolya”—the General smiled slyly, allowing the man who was not a political theorist to dispense with further ideological incantations—“we know that all of this is true. Do go on. I have a busy day planned.”
The Colonel nodded his appreciation. “These arrogant little bastards are not helping us. They are using us, they are using me, they are using my prisoners to blackmail us. And if this is Marxism-Leninism, then I’m a Trotskyite.” It was a joke that few would have been able to make lightly, but Grishanov’s father was a Central Committee member with impeccable political credentials.
“What are you learning, Comrade Colonel?” the General said, just to keep things on track.
“Colonel Zacharias is everything that we were told, and more. We are now planning how to defend the Rodina against the Chinese. He is the ‘blue team’ leader.”
“What?” The General blinked. “Explain?”
“This man is a fighter pilot, but also an expert on defeating air defenses. Can you believe it, he’s only flown bombers as a guest, but he’s actually planned SAC missions and helped to write SAC doctrine for defense-avoidance and -suppression. So now he’s doing that for me.”
“Notes?”
Grishanov’s face darkened. “Back at the camp. Our fraternal socialist comrades are ‘studying’ them. Comrade General, do you know how important this data is?”
The General was by profession a tank officer, not an aviator, but he was also one of the brighter stars rising in the Soviet firmament, here in Vietnam to study everything the Americans were doing. It was one of the premier jobs in his country’s uniformed service.
“I would imagine that it’s highly valuable.”
Kolya leaned forward. “In another two months, perhaps six weeks, I will be able to reverse-plan SAC. I’ll be able to think as they think. I will know not only what their current plans are, but I will also be able to duplicate their thinking into the future. Excuse me, I do not mean to inflate my importance,” he said sincerely. “This American is giving me a graduate course in American doctrine and philosophy. I’ve seen the intelligence estimates we get from KGB and GRU. At least half of it is wrong. That’s only one man. Another one has told me about their carrier doctrine. Another about NATO war plans. It goes on, Comrade General.”
“How do you do this, Nikolay Yevgeniyevich?” The General was new at this post, and had met Grishanov only once before, though his service reputation was better than excellent.
Kolya leaned back in his chair. “Kindness and sympathy.”
“To our enemies?” the General asked sharply.
“Is it our mission to inflict pain on these men?” He gestured outside. “That’s what they do, and what do they get for it? Mainly lies that sound good. My section in Moscow discounted nearly everything these little monkeys sent. I was told to come here to get information. That is what I am doing. I will take all the criticism I must in order to get information such as this, Comrade.”
The General nodded. “So why are you here?”
“I need more people! It’s too much for one man. What if I am killed—what if I get malaria or food poisoning—who will do my work? I can’t interrogate all of these prisoners myself. Especially now that they are beginning to talk, I take more and more time with each, and I lose energy. I lose continuity. There are not enough hours in the day.”
The General sighed. “I’ve tried. They offer you their best—”
Grishanov almost snarled in frustration. “Their best what? Best barbarians? That would destroy my work. I need Russians. Men, kulturny men! Pilots, experienced officers. I’m not interrogating private soldiers. These are real professional warriors. They are valuable to us because of what they know. They know much because they are intelligent, and because they are intelligent they will not respond well to crude methods. You know what I really need to support me? A good psychiatrist. And one more thing,” he added, inwardly trembling at his boldness.
“Psychiatrist? That is not serious. And I doubt that we’ll be able to get other men into the camp. Moscow is delaying shipments of antiaircraft rockets for ‘technical reasons.’ Our local allies are being difficult again, as I said, and the disagreement escalates.” The General leaned back and wiped sweat from his brow. “What is this other thing?”
“Hope, Comrade General. I need hope.” Colonel Nikolay Yevgeniyevich Grishanov gathered himself.
“Explain.”
“Some of these men know their situation. Probably all suspect it. They are well briefed on what happens to prisoners here, and they know that their status is unusual. Comrade General, the knowledge these men have is encyclopedic. Years of useful information.”
“You’re building up to something.”
“We can’t let them die,” Grishanov said, immediately qualifying himself to lessen the impact of what he was saying. “Not all of them. Some we must have. Some will serve us, but I must have something to offer to them.”
“Bring them back?”
“After the hell they’ve lived here—”
“They’re enemies, Colonel! They all trained to kill us! Save your sympathy for your own countrymen!” growled a man who’d fought in the snows outside Moscow.
Grishanov stood his ground, as the General had once done. “They are men, not unlike us, Comrade General. They have knowledge that is useful, if only we have the intelligence to extract it. It is that simple. Is it too much to ask that we treat them with kindness, that we give something in return for learning how to save our country from possible destruction? We could torture them, as our ‘fraternal socialist allies’ have done, and get nothing! Does that serve our country?” It came down to that, and the General knew it. He looked at the Colonel of Air Defense and his first expressed thought was the obvious one.
“You wish to risk my career along with yours? My father is not a Central Committeeman.” I could have used this man in my battalion. . . .
“Your father was a soldier,” Grishanov pointed out. “And like you, a good one.” It was a skillful play and both knew it, but what really mattered was the logic and significance of what Grishanov was proposing, an intelligence coup that would stagger the professional spies of KGB and GRU. There was only one possible reaction from a real soldier with a real sense of mission.
General-Lieutenant Yuri Konstantinovich Rokossovskiy pulled a bottle of vodka from his desk. It was the Starka label, dark, not clear, the best and most expensive. He poured two small glasses.
“I can’t get you more men. Certainly I cannot get you a physician, not even one in uniform, Kolya. But, yes, I will try to get you some hope.”
The third convulsion since her arrival at Sandy’s house was a minor one, but still troubling. Sarah had gotten her quieted down with as mild a shot of barbiturate as she dared. The blood work was back, and Doris was a veritable collection of problems. Two kinds of venereal disease, evidence of another systemic infection, and possibly a borderline diabetic. She was already attacking the first three problems with a strong dose of antibiotics. The fourth would be handled with diet and reevaluated later. For Sarah the signs of physical abuse were like something from a nightmare about another continent and another generation, and it was the mental aftermath of that that was the most disquieting of all, even as Doris Brown closed her eyes and lapsed into sleep.
“Doctor, I—”
“Sandy, will you please call me Sarah? We’re in your house, remember?”
Nurse O’Toole managed an embarrassed smile. “Okay, Sarah. I’m worried.”
“So am I. I’m worried about her physical condition, I’m worried about her psychological condition. I’m worried about her ‘friends’—”
“I’m worried about John,” Sandy said discordantly. Doris was under control. She could see that. Sarah Rosen was a gifted clinician, but something of a worrier, as many good physicians were.
Sarah headed out of the room. There was coffee downstairs. She could smell it and was heading for it. Sandy came with her. “Yes, that, too. What a strange and interesting man.”
“I don’t throw my newspapers away. Every week, same time, I bundle them together for the garbage collection—and I’ve been checking the back issues.”
Sarah poured two cups. She had very delicate movements, Sandy thought. “I know what I think. Tell me what you think,” the pharmacologist said.
“I think he’s killing people.” It caused her physical pain to say that.
“I think you’re right.” Sarah Rosen sat down and rubbed her eyes. “You never met Pam. Prettier than Doris, willowy, sort of, probably from an inadequate diet. It was much easier to wean her off the drugs. Not as badly abused, physically anyway, but just as much emotional hurt. We never got the whole story. Sam says that John did. But that’s not the important part.” Sarah looked up, and the pain O’Toole saw there was real and deep. “We had her saved, Sandy, and then something happened, and then something—something changed in John.”
Sandy turned to look out the window. It was quarter of seven in the morning. She could see people coming out in pajamas and bathrobes to get their morning papers and collect half-gallon bottles of milk. The early crowd was leaving for their cars, a process that in her neighborhood lasted until eight-thirty or so. She turned back. “No, nothing changed. It was always there. Something—I don’t know, released it, let it out? Like opening the door of a cage. What sort of man—part of him’s like Tim, but another part I just don’t understand.”
“What about his family?”
“He doesn’t have any. His mother and father are dead, no siblings. He was married—”
“Yes, I know about that, and then Pam.” Sarah shook her head. “So lonely.”
“Part of me says he’s a good man, but the other part . . . ” Sandy’s voice trailed off.
“My maiden name was Rabinowicz,” Sarah said, sipping her coffee. “My family comes from Poland. Papa left when I was too young to remember; mother died when I was nine, peritonitis. I was eighteen when the war started,” she went on. For her generation “the war” could mean only one thing. “We had lots of relatives in Poland. I remember writing to them. Then they all just disappeared. All gone—even now it’s hard to believe it really happened.”
“I’m sorry, Sarah, I didn’t know.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you talk a lot about.” Dr. Rosen shrugged. “People took something from me, though, and I couldn’t do anything about it. My cousin Reva was a good pen pal. I suppose they killed her one way or another, but I never found out who or where. Back then I was too young to understand. I suppose I was more puzzled than anything else. Later, I got angry—but against whom? I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. And there’s this empty space where Reva was. I still have her picture, black-and-white of a girl with pigtails, twelve years old, I guess. She wanted to be a ballet dancer.” Sarah looked up. “Kelly’s got an empty place, too.”
“But revenge—”
“Yeah, revenge.” The doctor’s expression was bleak. “I know. We’re supposed to think he’s a bad person, aren’t we? Call the police, even, turn him in for doing that.”
“I can’t—I mean, yes, but I just—”
“Neither will I. Sandy, if he were a bad person, why did he bring Doris up here? He’s risking his life two different ways.”
“But there’s something very scary about him.”
“He could have just walked away from her,” Sarah went on, not really hearing. “Maybe he’s just the sort of person who thinks he has to fix everything himself. But now we have to help.”
That turned Sandy around, giving her a respite from her real thoughts. “What are we going to do with her?”
“We’re going to get her well, as far as we can, and after that it’ll be up to her. What else can we do?” Sarah asked, watching Sandy’s face change again, returning to her real dilemma.
“But what about John?”
Sarah looked up. “I have never seen him do anything illegal. Have you?”
It was a weapons-training day. A solid cloud cover meant that no reconnaissance satellites, American or Soviet, could see what was happening here. Cardboard targets were set up around the compound, and the lifeless eyes of mannequins watched from the sandbox and swing set as the Marines emerged from the woods, passing through the simulated gate, firing low-powered rounds from their carbines. The targets were shredded in seconds. Two M-60 machine guns poured fire into the open door of the “barracks” —which would already have been wrecked by the two Huey Cobra gunships—while the snatch team raced into the “prison block.” There, twenty-five more mannequins were in individual rooms. Each was weighted to about one hundred fifty pounds—nobody thought that the Americans at SENDER GREEN would weigh even that much—and every one was dragged out while the fire-support element covered the evacuation.
Kelly stood next to Captain Pete Albie, who, it had been assumed for the purpose of the exercise, was dead. He was the only officer on the team, an aberration that was compensated for by the presence of so many senior NCOs. As they watched, the mannequins were dragged to the simulated fuselages of the rescue helicopters. These were mounted on semitrailers, and had come in at dawn. Kelly clicked his stopwatch when the last man was aboard.
“Five seconds under nominal, Captain.” Kelly held up the watch. “These boys are pretty good.”
“Except we’re not doing it in daylight, are we, Mr. Clark?” Albie, like Kelly, knew the nature of the mission. The Marines as yet did not—at least not officially—though by now they had to have a fairly good idea. He turned and smiled. “Okay, it’s only the third run-through.”
Both men went into the compound. The simulated targets were in feathery pieces, and their number was exactly double the worst-case estimate for the SENDER GREEN guard force. They replayed the assault in their minds, checking angles of fire. There were advantages and disadvantages to how the camp was set up. Following the rules in some nameless East Bloc manual, it didn’t fit the local terrain. Most conveniently indeed, the best avenue of approach coincided with the main gate. In adhering to a standard that allowed for maximum security against a possible escape attempt of the prisoners, it also facilitated an assault from without—but they didn’t expect that, did they?
Kelly ran over the assault plan in his mind. The insertion would put the Recon Marines on the ground one ridge away from SENDER GREEN. Thirty minutes for the Marines to approach the camp. M-79 grenades to eliminate the guard towers. Two Huey Cobra gunships—known with lethal elegance as “snakes” to the troops, and that appealed to him—would hose the barracks and provide heavy fire support—but the grenadiers on the team, he was sure, could take out the towers in a matter of five seconds, then pour willie-pete into the barracks and burn the guard force alive with deadly fountains of white flame, doing without the snakes entirely if they had to. Small and lean as this operation was, the size of the objective and the quality of the team made for unplanned safety factors. He thought of it as overkill, a term that didn’t just apply to nuclear weapons. In combat operations, safety lay in not giving the other guy a chance, to be ready to kill him two, three, a dozen times over in as little time as possible. Combat wasn’t supposed to be fair. To Kelly, things were looking very good indeed.
“What if they have mines?” Albie worried.
“On their own turf?” Kelly asked. “No sign of it from the photographs. The ground isn’t disturbed. No warning signs to keep their people away.”
“Their people would know, wouldn’t they?”
“On one of the photos there’s some goats grazing just outside the wire, remember?”
Albie nodded with some embarrassment. “Yeah, you’re right. I remember that.”
“Let’s not borrow trouble,” Kelly told him. He fell silent for a moment, realizing that he had been a mere E-7 chief petty officer, and now he was talking as an equal—more accurately as a superior—to an 0-3 captain of Recon Marines. That ought to have been—what? Wrong? If so, then why was he doing so well at it, and why was the captain accepting his words? Why was he Mr. Clark to this experienced combat officer? “We’re going to do it.”
“I think you’re right, Mr. Clark. And how do you get out?”
“As soon as the choppers come in, I break the Olympic record coming down that hill to the LZ. I call it a two-minute run.”
“In the dark?” Albie asked.
Kelly laughed. “I run especially fast in the dark, Captain.”
“Do you know how many Ka-Bar knives there are?”
From the tone of Douglas’s question, Lieutenant Ryan knew the news had to be bad. “No, but I suppose I’m about to find out.”
“Sunny’s Surplus just took delivery of a thousand of the goddamn things a month ago. The Marines must have enough and so now the Boy Scouts can buy them for four ninety-five. Other places, too. I didn’t know how many of the things were out there.”
“Me, neither,” Ryan admitted. The Ka-Bar was a very large and bulky weapon. Hoods carried smaller knives, especially switchblades, though guns were becoming increasingly common on the streets.
What neither man wanted to admit openly was that they were stymied again, despite what had appeared to be a wealth of physical evidence in the brownstone. Ryan looked down at the open file and about twenty forensic photographs. There had almost certainly been a woman there. The murder victim—probably a hood himself, but still officially a victim—had been identified immediately from the cards in his wallet, but the address on his driver’s license had turned out to be a vacant building. His collection of traffic violations had been paid on time, with cash. Richard Farmer had brushed with the police, but nothing serious enough to have merited a detailed inquiry. Tracking his family down had turned up precisely nothing. His mother—the father was long dead—had thought him a salesman of some sort. But somebody had nearly carved his heart out with a fighting knife, so quickly and decisively that the gun on the body hadn’t been touched. A full set of fingerprints from Farmer merely generated a new card. The central FBI register did not have a match. Neither did the local police, and though Farmer’s prints would be compared with a wide selection of unknowns, Ryan and Douglas didn’t expect much. The bedroom had provided three complete sets of Farmer‘s, all on window glass, and semen stains had matched his blood type—O. Another set of stains had been typed as AB, which could mean the killer or the supposed (not quite certain) missing owner of the Roadrunner. For all they knew the killer might have taken the time to have a quickie with the suspected female—unless homosexuality was involved, in which case the suspected female might not exist at all.
There were also a selection of partial prints, one of a girl (supposition, from their size), and one of a man (also supposition), but they were so partial that he didn’t expect much in the way of results. Worst of all, by the time the latent-prints team had gotten to check out the car parked outside, the blazing August sun had heated the car up so much that what might have been something to match prints with the registered owner of the car, one William Peter Grayson, had merely been a collection of heat-distorted blobs. It wasn’t widely appreciated that matching partial prints with less than ten points of identification was difficult at best.
A check of the FBI’s new National Crime Information Computer had turned up nothing on Grayson or Farmer. Finally, Mark Charon’s narcotics team had nothing on the names Farmer or Grayson. It wasn’t so much a matter of being back to square one. It was just that square seventeen didn’t lead them anywhere. But that was often the way of things in homicide investigation. Detective work was a combination of the ordinary and the remarkable, but more of the former than the latter. Forensic sciences could tell you much. They did have the imprint of a common-brand sneaker from tracks in the brownstone—brand new, a help. They did know the approximate stride of the killer, from which they had generated a height range of from five-ten to six-three, which, unfortunately, was taller than Virginia Charles had estimated—something they, however, discounted. They knew he was Caucasian. They knew he had to be strong. They knew that he was either very, very lucky or highly skilled with all manner of weapons. They knew that he probably had at least rudimentary skills in hand-to-hand combat—or, Ryan sighed to himself, had been lucky; after all, there had been only one such encounter, and that with an addict with heroin in his bloodstream. They knew he was disguising himself as a bum.
All of which amounted to not very much. More than half of male humanity fell into the estimated height range. Considerably more than half of the men in the Baltimore metropolitan area were white. There were millions of combat veterans in America, many from elite military units—and the fact of the matter was that infantry skills were infantry skills, and you didn’t have to be a combat vet to know them, and his country had had a draft for over thirty years, Ryan told himself. There were perhaps as many as thirty thousand men within a twenty-mile radius who fit the description and skill-inventory of his unknown suspect. Was he in the drug business himself? Was he a robber? Was he, as Farber had suggested, a man on some sort of mission? Ryan leaned heavily to the latter model, but he could not afford to discount the other two. Psychiatrists, and detectives, had been wrong before. The most elegant theories could be shattered by a single inconvenient fact. Damn. No, he told himself, this one was exactly what Farber said he was. This wasn’t a criminal. This was a killer, something else entirely.
“We just need the one thing,” Douglas said quietly, knowing the look on his lieutenant’s face.
“The one thing,” Ryan repeated. It was a private bit of shorthand. The one thing to break a case could be a name, an address, the description or tag number of a car, a person who knew something. Always the same, though frequently different, it was for the detective the crucial piece in the jigsaw puzzle that made the picture clear, and for the suspect the brick which, taken from the wall, caused everything to fall apart. And it was out there. Ryan was sure of it. It had to be there, because this killer was a clever one, much too clever for his own good. A suspect like this who eliminated a single target could well go forever undetected, but this one was not satisfied with killing one person, was he? Motivated neither by passion nor by financial gain, he was committed to a process, every step of which involved complex dangers. That was what would do him in. The detective was sure of it. Clever as he was, those complexities would continue to mount one upon the other until something important fell loose from the pile. It might even have happened already, Ryan thought, correctly.
“Two weeks,” Maxwell said.
“That fast?” James Greer leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Dutch, that’s really fast.”
“You think we should fiddle around?” Podulski asked.
“Damn it, Cas, I said it was fast. I didn’t say it was wrong. Two weeks’ more training, one week of travel and setup?” Greer asked, getting a nod. “What about weather?”
“The one thing we can’t control,” Maxwell admitted. “But weather works both ways. It makes flying difficult. It also messes up radar and gunnery.”
“How in hell did you get all the pieces moving this early?” Greer asked with a mixture of disbelief and admiration.
“There are ways, James. Hell, we’re admirals, aren’t we? We give orders, and guess what? Ships actually move.”
“So the window opens in twenty-one days?”
“Correct. Cas flies out tomorrow to Constellation. We start briefing the air-support guys. Newport News is already clued in—well, partway. They think they’re going to sweep the coast for triple-A batteries. Our command ship is plodding across the big pond right now. They don’t know anything either except to rendezvous with TF-77.”
“I have a lot of briefing to do,” Cas confirmed with a grin.
“Helicopter crews?”
“They’ve been training at Coronado. They come into Quantico tonight. Pretty standard stuff, really. The tactics are straightforward. What does your man ‘Clark’ say?”
“He’s my man now?” Greer asked. “He tells me he’s comfortable with how things are going. Did you enjoy being killed?”
“He told you?” Maxwell chuckled. “James, I knew the boy was good from what he did with Sonny, but it’s different when you’re there to see it—hell, to not see or hear it. He shut Marty Young up, and that’s no small feat. Embarrassed a lot of Marines, too.”
“Give me a timeline on getting mission approval,” Greer said. It was serious now. He’d always thought the operation had merit, and watching it develop had been a lesson in many things that he’d need to know at CIA. Now he believed it possible. BOXWOOD GREEN might well succeed if allowed to go.
“You’re sure Mr. Ritter won’t waffle on us?”
“I don’t think he will. He’s one of us, really.”
“Not until all the pieces are in place,” Podulski said.
“He’ll want to see a rehearsal,” Greer warned. “Before you ask a guy to stick it on the line, he has to have confidence in the job.”
“That’s fair. We have a full-up live-fire rehearsal tomorrow night.”
“We’ll be there, Dutch,” Greer promised.
The team was in an old barracks designed for at least sixty men, and there was plenty of room for everyone, enough that no one had a top bunk. Kelly had a private room set aside, one of those designed into the standard barracks for squad sergeants to sleep in. He’d decided not to live on his boat. One could not be part of the team and yet be totally separate from it.
They were enjoying their first night off since arriving at Quantico, and some kind soul had arranged for three cases of beer. That made for exactly three bottles each, since one of their number only drank Dr Pepper, and Master Gunnery Sergeant Irvin made sure that none of their number exceeded the limit.
“Mr. Clark,” one of the grenadiers asked, “what’s this all about?”
It wasn’t fair, Kelly thought, to make them train without letting them know. They prepared for danger without knowing why, without knowing what purpose occasioned the risk of their lives and their future. It wasn’t fair at all, but it wasn’t unusual either. He looked straight in the man’s eyes.
“I can’t tell you, Corp. All I can say is, it’s something you’ll be mighty proud of. You have my word on that, Marine.”
The corporal, at twenty-one the youngest and most junior man of the group, hadn’t expected an answer, but he’d had to ask. He accepted the reply with a raise-can salute.
“I know that tattoo,” a more senior man said.
Kelly smiled, finishing his second. “Oh, I got drunk one night, and I guess I got mistook for somebody else.”
“All SEALs are good for is balancing a ball on their nose,” a buck sergeant said, following it with a belch.
“Want me to demonstrate with one of yours?” Kelly asked quickly.
“Good one!” The sergeant tossed Kelly another beer.
“Mr. Clark?” Irvin gestured to the door. It was just as sticky-hot out there as inside, with a gentle breeze coming through the long-needled pines and the flapping of bats, invisibly chasing insects.
“What is it?” Kelly asked, taking a long pull.
“That’s my question, Mr. Clark, sir,” Irvin said lightly. Then his voice changed. “I know you.”
“Oh?”
“Third Special Operations Group. My team backed you guys up on ERMINE COAT. You’ve come far for an E-6,” Irvin observed.
“Don’t spread it around, but I made chief before I left. Does anybody else know?”
Irvin chuckled. “No, I expect Captain Albie would sure as hell get his nose outa joint if he found out, and General Young might have a conniption. We’ll just keep it ‘tween us, Mr. Clark,” Irvin said, establishing his position in oblique but uncertain terms.
“This wasn’t my idea—being here, I mean. Admirals are easy to impress, I suppose.”
“I’m not, Mr. Clark. You almost gave me a fucking heart attack with that rubber knife of yours. I don’t remember your name, your real one, I mean, but you’re the guy they called Snake, aren’t you? You’re the guy did PLASTIC FLOWER.”
“That wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did,” Kelly pointed out.
“We were your backup on that, too. The goddamned chopper died—engine quit ten feet off the ground—thump. That’s why we didn’t make it. Nearest alternate was from First Cav. That’s why it took so long.”
Kelly turned. Irvin’s face was as black as the night. “I didn’t know.”
The master gunnery sergeant shrugged in the darkness. “I seen the pictures of what happened. The skipper told us that you were a fool to break the rules like that. But that was our fault. We should have been there twenty minutes after your call. If’n we got there on time, maybe one or two of those little girls might have made it. Anyway, reason we didn’t was a bad seal on the engine, just a little goddamn piece of rubber that cracked.”
Kelly grunted. On such events the fates of nations turned. “Could have been worse—it could have let go at altitude and you woulda really been in the shitter.”
“True. Miserable fuckin’ reason for a child to die, isn’t it?” Irvin paused, gazing into the darkness of the piney woods as men of his profession did, always looking and listening. “I understand why you did it. I wanted you to know. Probably woulda done the same myself. Maybe not as good as you, but sure as hell, I would have tried, and I wouldn’t have let that motherfucker live, orders or no orders.”
“Thanks, Guns,” Kelly said quietly, dropping back into Navyspeak.
“It’s Song Tay, isn’t it?” Irvin observed next, knowing that he’d get his answer now.
“Something close to that, yes. They should be telling you soon.”
“You have to tell me more, Mr. Clark. I have Marines to worry about.”
“The site is set up just right, perfect match. Hey, I’m going in, too, remember?”
“Keep talking,” Irvin ordered gently.
“I helped plan the insertion. With the right people, we can do it. Those are good boys you have in there. I won’t say it’s easy or any dumb shit like that, but it’s not all that hard. I’ve done harder. So have you. The training is going right. It looks pretty good to me, really.”
“You sure it’s worth it?”
That was a question with meaning so deep that few would have understood it. Irvin had done two combat tours, and though Kelly hadn’t seen his official “salad bar” of decorations, he was clearly a man who had circled the block many times. Now Irvin was watching what might well be the destruction of his Marine Corps. Men were dying for hills that were given back as soon as they were taken and the casualties cleared, then to return in six months to repeat the exercise. There was just something in the professional soldier that hated repetition. Although training was just that—they had “assaulted” the site numerous times—the reality of war was supposed to be one battle for one place. In that way a man could tell what progress was. Before looking forward to a new objective, you could look back to see how far you had come and measure your chance for success by what you had learned before. But the third time you watched men die for the same piece of ground, then you knew. You just knew how things were going to end. Their country was still sending men to that place, asking them to risk their lives for dirt already watered in American blood. The truth was that Irvin would not have voluntarily gone back for a third combat tour. It wasn’t a question of courage or dedication or love of country. It was that he knew his life was too valuable to be risked for nothing. Sworn to defend his country, he had a right to ask for something in return—a real mission to fight for, not an abstraction, something real. And yet Irvin felt guilt, felt that he had broken faith, had betrayed the motto of The Corps, Semper Fidelis: Always Faithful. The guilt had compelled him to volunteer for one last mission despite his doubts and questions. Like a man whose beloved wife has slept with another man, Irvin could not stop loving, could not stop caring, and he would accept to himself the guilt unacknowledged by those who had earned it.
“Guns, I can’t tell you this, but I will anyway. The place we’re hitting, it’s a prison camp, like you think, okay?”
Irvin nodded. “More to it. There has to be.”
“It’s not a regular camp. The men there, they’re all dead. Guns.” Kelly crushed the beer can. “I’ve seen the photos. One guy we identified for sure, Air Force colonel, the NVA said he was killed, and so we think these guys, they’ll never come home unless we go get ’em. I don’t want to go back either, man. I’m scared, okay? Oh, yeah, I’m good, I’m real good at this stuff. Good training, maybe I have a knack for it.” Kelly shrugged, not wanting to say the next part.
“Yeah. But you can only do it so long.” Irvin handed over another beer.
“I thought three was the limit.”
“I’m a Methodist, not supposed to drink at all.” Irvin chuckled. “People like us, Mr. Clark.”
“Dumb sunzabitches, aren’t we? There’s Russians in the camp, probably interrogating our people. They’re all high-rank, and we think they’re all officially dead. They’re probably being grilled real hard for what they know, because of who they are. We know they’re there, and if we don’t do anything . . . what’s that make us?” Kelly stopped himself, suddenly needing to go further, to tell what else he was doing, because he had found someone who might truly understand, and for all his obsession with avenging Pam his soul was becoming heavy with its burden.
“Thank you, Mr. Clark. That’s a fuckin’ mission,” Master Gunnery Sergeant Paul Irvin told the pine trees and the bats. “So you’re first in and last out?”
“I’ve worked alone before.”