Conspiracy

by Stephen Coonts

  Rubens, though undoubtedly used to her impertinence by now, blinked twice.

  “Because I’m wondering,” continued Lia, “if you were fighting for custody, and you didn’t get it, would it be enough to kill yourself?”

  “Assuredly not. But I hardly think I am a representative sample, Lia. Keep an open mind—draw no conclusions.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know all that.”

  Rubens frowned, then resumed his lecture on how to behave.

  28

  THERE WERE SEVERAL reasons Dean remembered the mission to kill Phuc Dinh. The first was the oddness of the first name—though it was common enough in Vietnam, the obscenity it sounded like in English was not easily forgotten.

  The second was the comparative uniqueness of the mission. “Hunter-kills”—assignments to kill a specific person—while not rare for scout snipers in Vietnam, were relatively infrequent; even though Dean was considered good at them, he racked up only a handful during a year’s tour. Most often, he and other snipers worked with Marine units during patrols or sweeps, striking North Vietnamese Army units operating in the area.

  Even as a hunter-kill, the assignment was unique. It was on the Laos border, and the man giving the assignment went out of his way to specify that Phuc Dinh was a priority target “to the exclusion of all others.” Which meant don’t waste your time shooting anybody else until this SOB is toast.

  But for Dean, the assignment stood out for one reason far beyond all the others: it was on this mission that he had lost his best friend in the world, John Longbow.

  Dean had met Corporal John Longbow in Scout Sniper School. Unlike Dean, who’d gotten the assignment directly out of boot camp, Longbow had already been to Vietnam before volunteering to become a sniper. Everyone in Scout Sniper School was a standout Marine. Longbow was a standout among the standouts.

  At first, the instructors tried to push Longbow harder because he was the oldest, but it quickly became clear that he pushed himself harder than even the toughest taskmaster could. By the end of the first week, the sergeant in charge of the unit was relying on Longbow as a fourth instructor.

  Despite all this—or maybe because of it—the other trainees in the unit shied away from him, especially in the few hours they had “off duty” following training. The corporal never said much, and many interpreted his silence as a kind of arrogance. And working with him on the range could be a little demoralizing—he was so precise, so controlled, so perfect, that anyone who measured himself against Longbow inevitably came up short.

  Force Recon shared the camp with Scout Sniper School, and there was occasionally some bad blood between the two units. From the snipers’ point of view, the Force Recon trainees were always looking for a fight, trying to prove that they were the real Marines and that everyone else in the service was an embarrassment. They called snipers’ rifle boxes diaper bags; the put-downs increased exponentially in vulgarity from there.

  One night Longbow had just made the chow line when four or five Force Recon show-offs began making fun of him, calling him Tonto and asking if he’d gotten his red face from lipstick. Longbow, who was somewhat touchy about his Indian heritage, ignored them at first, but this only egged them on more. Dean walked into the mess hall to find Longbow surrounded. Not knowing exactly what was going on—but already disliking the other unit for its habit of bragging and abusing the snipers—Dean double-timed to Longbow’s side. The corporal glanced over his shoulder, saw Dean, then turned back and stared at the other men.

  “Oh, whoa, it’s the evil eye,” cracked one of the Force Recon trainees. “I’m feeling weak. Weak.”

  He fell to the floor. The others convulsed in laughter.

  For a moment, Dean wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Or rather, he was sure Longbow was going to kick the Marine on the ground in the face and after that wasn’t sure what would happen. Dean figured, though, that he would be backing up his fellow platoon member.

  Instead, Longbow stared for a second longer, then turned away. It was a good thing, too—a captain had seen what was going on from the far side of the mess hall and was on his way over. Had there been a fight, all of the men would undoubtedly have been kicked out of their respective schools.

  Dean and Longbow ate together in silence. They never spoke of the incident again. But from that point on, Longbow helped Dean whenever he could, offering him different bits of advice on the range and helping him master some of the finer points of the shooting art, such as compensating for winds above 10 miles an hour.

  They were assigned to the same unit in Vietnam—not much of a surprise, since about two-thirds of the school’s graduates were sent there. After requalification at Da Nang, Dean, Longbow, and four other men they’d trained with joined a unit in an area known as “Arizona Territory.” Their assignments varied, taking them to the Laos border and back, generally to work with Marine companies on sweeps or at forward camps where at night the enemy was so close you could smell the fish he’d had for dinner.

  The origin of the nickname Arizona was in some doubt. Some Marines thought it was an apt comparison of the highly dangerous area to the Arizona of the lawless Old West. Others thought it came from the parched pieces of landscape, scorched by Agent Orange. In any event, the nickname was not a compliment.

  Usually the snipers went out in two-man teams, especially when they were working alongside other Marine units conducting patrols or attacking an enemy-held area. At first, the new men were teamed up with more experienced snipers; before long, they were the experienced hands and others the newbies. Dean and Longbow only worked together on CID missions, and then only very important ones for which they were hand-selected by their CO.

  “CID” stood for “Counter Intelligence Department”; the organization was actually a CIA group that ran special operations in the area, often using Marine snipers to get things done. A CID mission could involve gathering intelligence, or it could target a special VC soldier or official for assassination. The mission against Phuc Dinh was the latter.

  “PHUC DINH LIVES in a village about three miles from the border,” John Rogers told Dean and Longbow. The CIA officer had commandeered their commander’s tent to brief the mission. Rogers had only been in the region for a few months, but that must have seemed like forever to him; he bucked up his facade of courage with gin, and the stink sat heavy on him even at 0800.

  “There’s a series of tunnels in this canyon here,” said Rogers, pointing at the map. He sat in a canvas-backed field chair; Dean and Longbow were across from him on the captain’s rack. “They used to hole up in them on their way south until we got wise to them. Now they go much further west, over the border.”

  Dean stared at the grid map. Experience had shown the relationship between such maps and the real world was often tenuous. Villages were often misnamed and in some cases a considerable distance from where they were supposed to be. More important, maps could never tell you the most important thing—where the enemy was.

  “Phuc Dinh goes across the valley into Laos every week to ten days to make contact with units on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. He travels at night. Your best bet at catching him alone is on one of those nights.

  “Dinh is your target, to the exclusion of any others.”

  Dean glanced over at Longbow. The sniper was staring intently at the back of the captain’s tent, zoning in the distance. Dean guessed Longbow was thinking of the mission.

  Rogers rose to leave.

  “Can we go into Laos to get him?” Dean asked Rogers.

  “Technically, no.” Rogers picked up the small briefcase he’d brought with him. “Send a message back that the red hawk has died.”

  THE MISSION BRIEF did not include the reason that Phuc Dinh was to be shot. It was obvious that he must be some sort of important VC official, though that alone probably wasn’t enough to arouse CID’s wrath. But reasons were irrelevant to Dean and Longbow; Phuc Dinh was the enemy, and that was all the reason they needed to kill anyone.

 
The two snipers rode with a Marine company making a sweep about ten miles south of Phuc Dinh’s village; the unit ran into trouble as soon as their helicopters landed and Dean and Longbow spent nearly five days with them, the first three within spitting distance of the landing zone. Dean and Longbow didn’t much mind the time itself, since they weren’t sure when Phuc Dinh would be moving, but the delay cost them valuable supplies, most notably about half of the ammo for Longbow’s bolt rifle, a Remington 700. Dean, acting as Longbow’s spotter, though ordinarily a team leader himself, carried an M14 with a starlight scope.

  Finally, the unit managed to extricate itself and got under way. When Dean and Longbow split off from the others, they were just under six miles from Phuc Dinh’s village. The jungle was so thick there that it took a whole day to walk three miles toward it. Then, just as they were settling down for the night, they caught a strong odor of fish on the wind.

  A VC unit was moving through the area, possibly stalking the Marines Dean and Longbow had just left. The smell came from the food the Vietcong ate and meant they were incredibly close, perhaps only a dozen feet away.

  To the Vietcong, Americans smelled like soap, and probably the only thing that saved Dean and Longbow was the fact that they had been in the bush long enough for the grime to overwhelm any lingering Ivory scent. The Vietcong passed them right by.

  There was only one problem. The enemy guerillas were moving in the direction of the unit Dean and Longbow had left.

  The snipers didn’t have a radio. In those days, effective radios were bulky and had to be carried on your back. They were also in short supply. So there was no way of alerting the other unit short of sneaking back and telling them.

  Dean and Longbow discussed what to do. Their orders had priority, clearly—“exclusion of any others” was supposed to cover a situation like this—but they couldn’t leave their fellow Marines to be blindsided. Dean and Longbow circled to the southwest, stalking the stalkers.

  Four hours later, the Vietnamese unit reached the flank of the main unit. Dean, looking through the starlight scope of his M14, saw one of the Vietcong rise to throw hand grenades and begin the attack. He put a three-round burst into the man’s head. The grenade detonated, and the firefight was on. The guerillas lost the element of surprise and quickly withdrew. Dean and Longbow had to retreat as well, barely escaping the crossfire. The detour had cost them not only several hours but also more ammo and water.

  “VILLAGE HAS FIVE huts,” said Dean, looking at it through his field glasses. “Five huts. Shit.”

  “You sure this is the place? Supposed to be four or five times that.”

  He pulled out his map again. While it could be difficult to correlate points, in this case the location seemed fairly obvious—the village was located at the mouth of a bend in a small creek, which corresponded with the map. There were other geographic marks as well, including the road and the valley three miles to the west.

  EVEN SO, THEY took another day making sure, circling across to the valley and back, even moving to the edge of a second village two miles to the south. This village was also considerably smaller than the map and briefing had indicated, and in the end Dean concluded that the information, like so much intelligence they were given, was simply wrong.

  So they went ahead and set up an ambush. There were at least four different paths from the village into the valley, but the sharp cliffs on the east side of the valley meant there were only two passes across, and both lay within a half mile of each other. The snipers had their choice of three positions to fire from, all between five and six hundred yards. They settled on a good spot in the middle, not because of the range—even the M14 could handle that distance—but because a fifty-foot sheer drop made a surprise attack from the rear unlikely.

  Twenty-four hours passed without them spotting anyone. While their position was shaded, the heat kept increasing and both men stripped to their skivvies to try to keep cool. Conserving water was difficult in the heat. It was the dry season, and a particularly parched stretch at that; moisture of any kind was hard to find. From about dusk to midnight—the time they figured Phuc Dinh was most likely to be traveling—they both stood watch. During the other twenty hours or so they took turns resting—it wasn’t sleep really, more a fitful sitting in a nook of the rocks.

  By the fourth day, they were both down to their final canteen of water. Refilling the others was not a problem—they’d spotted a shallow spring-fed brook about a mile away on the way in—but it was, of course, dangerous, since only one person could go and there was no way the other could cover him while watching the trail.

  Dean, as second man on the team, should have been the one to go. But Longbow overruled him.

  “I need to stretch my legs,” he told Dean, taking the M14. “Don’t break my gun.”

  Some men believed it was bad luck and worse to let anyone else touch your gun. Longbow didn’t; Dean had fired his rifle before.

  Still, Dean did think about it as he watched his companion climb up and then down the hill. There didn’t figure to be any action while Longbow was gone, though. It was still daytime.

  Dean made sure he had the bolt rifle sighted properly, then picked up the binoculars and resumed watching the trail. He stared through the glasses for more than a half hour without blinking. He could see a lot more with the binoculars than he could with his sniper’s scope, but he was always conscious that they, too, were limited. The world the binoculars showed was carved into precise circles, and the real world was not.

  About an hour after Longbow left, a cone-shaped hat poked over the hill in the distance. Within a few seconds it was joined by a second, then a third and a fourth. Four men were moving across the trail toward Dean. They weren’t “ordinary” villagers, either—all carried AK-47s.

  Dean scanned them carefully. Phuc Dinh was not among them. Dean let them pass.

  Not more than five minutes later, another villager appeared. It was Phuc Dinh.

  Dean knew it was. He saw Phuc Dinh’s face, and the scar. And he was moving quickly, confidently. Probably the four men who had passed first were a security team, making sure the path was clear.

  Phuc Dinh had a pistol in his belt but no other weapon. Dean stared through the scope of the bolt rifle, steadying his breathing. Phuc Dinh’s head moved toward the crosshairs. The wind was 3 miles an hour.

  Just as Dean’s finger started to pressure the trigger, shots rang out up the trail behind him. The shots were from an AK-47—years later, Dean would still remember the distinctive stutter the 7.62mm bullets made as they left the barrel, the sound partly echoing against the rocks, partly muffled by the jungle.

  There was no way that the shots could have warned Phuc Dinh in time. Dean was already pressing the trigger. And yet for some reason Phuc Dinh had already begun to dive away.

  Maybe Dean rushed the shot. Maybe the wind kicked up incredibly. Maybe the fact that the weapon wasn’t his—even though he’d fired it before—messed him up. Maybe Phuc Dinh had seen a flash of light from Dean’s scope, or realized he was vulnerable, or just had an itch to move. Maybe this was just the one time out of ten thousand that a sniper missed a shot.

  In any event, Dean’s shot went wide left, hitting Phuc Dinh’s arm rather than his chest as he fell or threw himself off the side of the trail.

  Dean immediately corrected and took another shot. He struck the only part of Phuc Dinh that was exposed, his right leg. As that shot hit home, Phuc Dinh bounced farther down, completely out of Dean’s view.

  In the meantime, the automatic-weapons fire behind Dean continued. The gunfire wasn’t meant as a warning, and it wasn’t being fired at Dean. The men had obviously come across Longbow.

  Dean ignored the other gunfire. His job was to take out Phuc Dinh. Only when that was done could Dean help his friend. Dean climbed up out of his “hide” or sniper’s nest and began circling to the west across the ridge for a shot. He had to go about ten yards before he could see into the spot where Phuc Dinh ha
d dropped.

  He wasn’t there.

  Dean took a long, slow breath. The important thing, he told himself, was not to make a mistake. He knew he’d gotten Phuc Dinh in the leg and, while that wasn’t fatal, it would slow him considerably. Most likely he’d moved back down the trail into the jungle. All Dean had to do was track him.

  As Dean started down the rocks, he heard the gunfire in the distance intensify.

  There was no question that he had to stay with his target until he was dead. Longbow would have done the same. The fact that the Vietnamese were firing so many shots was a good thing; it meant that they probably didn’t have a real target, and they were giving their positions away besides.

  And yet Dean did feel a tug as he moved down the hillside, low to the ground, snaking toward the edge of the jungle, hunting his prey.

  It couldn’t have taken Dean more than five minutes to get to a spot in the trail that he calculated would have been far enough behind Phuc Dinh that he could cut him off. But after Dean reached it, he spotted a few drops of blood, making it clear that the target had already slipped by.

  Dean began to follow the trail, aware that he might be the hunted rather than the hunter. After about two hundred yards, he realized he wasn’t seeing the blood anymore. He stopped, listening, but heard nothing. He moved into the brush and began paralleling the trail.

  By now the sun was almost directly overhead, and while the trees provided shade, the heat steamed through him. He was thirsty. Dean told himself that Phuc Dinh had to be tiring as well and that, wounded, he’d be slower and less careful. Dean pushed on. He stopped every few yards, listening. Finally he heard a sound—brush moving—and he froze.

  At first, Dean wasn’t exactly sure where the sound came from. Then he heard something else, which helped him locate it thirty feet to his left. He snaked through the vegetation, moving toward the sound as quietly as he could.

  The thick leaves were more effective than a smoke screen. Men could pass within a few feet of each other and not be seen. Hearing was more important, though the jungle filtered that as well, mixing in the sounds of animals and the natural rustle of the wind as a screen.