Sweepers

by P. T. Deutermann

  Sweepers

  P. T. Deutermann

  People who are important to Admiral Tag Sherman are dying under mysterious circumstances, leaving him large amounts of money. When a homicide detective starts asking embarrassing questions, Naval Commander Karen Lawrence is asked to investigate. Sherman suspects that he is being set up by an old enemy, a man he left behind in the swamps of Vietnam, formally MIA but really one of the nastiest of the rogue CIA "sweepers"?killers whose job is to get rid of other killers. Lawrence's investigation is complicated by naval politics, and just when she thinks she understands what's going on, yet another layer of treachery is revealed. What the book lacks in clarity it makes up for in suspense, danger, and a disturbing vision of the CIA run amok. Deutermann (Official Privilege, St. Martin's, 1995) has written a fine page-turner for popular collections.?Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Iowa

  Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

  ### From Booklist

  A skeleton from the Vietnam closet upsets the career ascent of several posterior-covering admirals. The skeleton is a secret assassin named Galantz, sore at being abandoned in the Mekong Delta by a navy lieutenant. Now an admiral, Tag Sherman becomes the object of the assassin's vengeance. Two naval people, male and female, investigate the case, which arises when two of Sherman's friends die suddenly. Sherman blames that old assassin, a point debated continuously by the investigators. But readers, through the magic of authorial omniscience, eavesdrop on Sherman's superiors in the Pentagon and discover that Sherman is probably truthful; but "those people up the river" (the CIA) have lost control of their assassin. However, those people have deep-cover "sweepers" who clean up such embarrassments, creating the action of an unknown sweeper chasing the investigators who are chasing Galantz. Despite their scrapes with danger, the investigators are flat characters, leaving plausible portrayals of Pentagon office politics as this mystery's primary asset. *Gilbert Taylor*

  SWEEPERS by P. T. DEUTERMANN

  This book is dedicated to all the honest cops, throughout the country, who try their very best to keep us all safe.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank It. Bruce Guth and the members of the Fairfax County Homicide Section; Comdr. M. T. Hall of the Navy JAG Corps for organizational advice; the expert on optical weapons, who must remain nameless; Drs. Brooks and Parks for medical pathology reference; Suzanne Olmsted for Doberman lore; Nick Ellison for intense moral support; and George Witte for careful editing. The names and functions of some government entities have been altered deliberately, as have some police procedures and forensics parameters. Any errors and omissions are, of course, mine.

  Any resemblance (if the characters described herein to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Nothing in this book-is meant to represent the policies or views of the U.S. Department of Defense.

  This is, for the most part, a work of fiction.

  PROLOGUE.

  THE RUNG SAT SECRET ZONE, IV CORPS, VIETNAM, 1969.

  Marcus Galantz tilted his head back, pushed his nose above the surface of the water, and took a silent breath. He bumped the top of his head against the underside of the mangrove trunk and then realized the airspace was getting bigger here in the root cage. Ebb tide, finally. He discarded the breathing reed, breathing normally for the first time in two hours. He didn’t bother to open his eyes, knowing that he would hear the boat long before he would ever be able to see it in the darkness of the river. He reached out to touch the mangrove roots, which felt like smooth, slippery bones extending from the tree above down into the alluvial muck of the riverbanks.

  There was only one drawback to a mangrove root cage with a space large enough to admit a human, but so far he’d been lucky.

  He submerged again and listened. The Swift boats -would go quiet and darken ship when they drifted back down the river for the pickup, their huge diesels silenced. But they always kept their radar on. Without the engine alternators, the radar drew power from its battery-operated motor generator, which emitted a high-pitched whine through the boat’s aluminum hull, a sound that could be heard for some distance underwater.

  He listened. Still nothing. He surfaced silently, aware that there might be a VC patrol nearby, probing the banks for him. Nighttime in the Rung Sat belonged to Charlie, although there weren’t as many as there had been two nights ago.

  He shifted his feet in the muck, making sure he hadn’t been sinking ankle into a root tangle. A few noxious bubbles percolated up through the black water and broke soundlessly near his face. With his right hand, he made a fingertip inventory of the root cage, feeling for the gap that occurred where two roots diverged, about thigh-high in the cage. To get out, he must submerge, turn sideways, and push down through the gap. He would then swim out underwater, homing on the bearing of the motor generator’s whine, until he reached the boat.

  His hand encountered the opening. Right. There. Okay.

  He settled back against the landward side of the cavity and concentrated on his breathing. At one point, he thought he detected soft footfalls above; faint vibrations stirring the mud banks, a rhythmic sense of pressure.

  C’mon, boat.

  With the two big Jimmies shut down, the only sounds in the cramped pilothouse where Tag Sherman sat came from the sweep motor grinding away inside the radar display unit.

  It was one of those bottom-of-the-well, pitch-black nights on the Long Tao… The surface of the river itself was indistinguishable from the motionless curtain of sodden night air and the black line of steaming vegetation on the near banks. “Near banks, hell, Sherman thought. The Long Tao was only a hundred yards wide here just below the S-turn. The scale of the radar screen reproached him-he had it on the two-hundred-yard scale. Much too close to the bank. Ambush city.

  He squirmed in the driver’s chair of the sixty-foot-long gunboat, his khaki trousers sticking to the seat. He had to sit almost sideways to keep his head hunched over the hood that shielded the amber radar screen to his right. His left hand rested loosely on the engine start buttons.

  He could hear and feel the subtle movements of the rest of the Swift boat through the thin aluminum superstructure.

  Above the pilothouse, just behind his head, he sensed Gunner’s Mate Second Kelly shifting around in the cage of the twin 50 machine-gun mount, training the heavy black barrels in a gentle sweeping motion from side to side, the roller path of the cage so heavily greased that it made little sucking sounds when the guns moved. Back down behind him in the cabin, Radioman Second Ryker would be kneeling on the starboard-side bench seat, hunched over an M60 machine gun stuck through . the little window, his headset wire stretching over to the HF radio set. Gunner Jarret, desperate for a cigarette, would have the port side covered with an M 16 set on full auto, a backup magazine taped to the bottom of the service clip. Engineman First Keene would be on one of the bunks down in the tiny, stuffy cabin beneath the pilothouse. As the off-duty driver, Keene technically was supposed to be sleeping, but more likely he was fully awake, sweating in his combat gear and cradling his beloved captured Kalashnikov.

  Back on the fantail, Boatswain Second Yanckley would be sitting on an upended mortar crate, pointing the Hotchkiss gun to starboard, a full-pack white-phosphorous round loaded in. its 81-mm mortar tube and a prodigious chew stuck in the side of his mouth. Sherman grinned in the darkness. With the turretlike armor-plated jacket and a steel helmet big enough to accommodate both his sound-powered phones and his large, many-chinned, round bead, the bosun would look like a big armor-plated toad back there on his ammo crate. But with that mortar, Yaftk was the Man: He could hit a palm tree at a thousand yards, as a few Victor Charlies had learned just before they went to see Baby Jesus in a cloud of superheated white phosphorus. Or maybe o
ver here it was Baby Buddha.

  Sherman took a deep breath and let it out quietly. The stinking wet air gave his lungs little satisfaction, and there was a persistent metallic taste on his tongue. He screwed his ears on even harder, trying to sift out any human sounds coming through the pilothouse doors on either side from the nearby reed beds and palmetto grass. With the engines shut down, they were unable to maneuver, and they had drifted in much closer to the shoreline than was wise. He could smell the banks of the river now that the ebb tide had begun in earnest, the muddy, earthy smell of an ancient swamp, threaded now with the stink of Agent Orange and the sewery effluvium coming down from Saigon, some twenty miles upstream.

  Ordinarily, they would keep themselves precisely out in the middle of the river, but not tonight. They were drifting on purpose, fully darkened, all electronics running on the batteries, while they slipped downstream at the whim of the Mekong tidal currents. Their mission tonight was a SEAL pickup. Three nights ago, they had come roaring up the Long Tao through this same area, making lots of noise, lights on, the big 39 boat throwing up a powerful wake, which chased the monkeys off the banks and caused the smaller crocodiles to grunt in irritation and slither into the water. One mile above the S-turn, they had slowed to idle speed and then, when darkness fell, shut her down, going dark and quiet, to begin the slow drift back toward the insertion point at the’top of the S-turn.

  Tag could still conjure up an image of the SEAL sitting all the way at the back of the boat, perched on top of the mortar ammo locker in the familiar costume: an olive green floppy hat and T-shirt, khaki swim trunks, flip-flops, and a knife strapped to one ankle. No guns, radios, flippers, masks, or anything else. And no talk. And no face-just eyes.

  The man’s facial features had been obscured by the floppy hat and heavy daubs of green and brown paint, but Tag remembered those eyes: bright, dark ‘ intense eyes, looking right back at you. Tag and his crew had done six SEAL insertions in the Rung Sat over the past year, and he had never heard one of them speak. more than about three words.

  Sherman shifted his flak jacket and scratched his neck where some insect had just achieved a blood meal. He tried to remember if he’d taken his malaria pills. The interesting thing was how surprisingly normal these guys looked, as opposed to being huge, bandoliered macho monsters. Like this guy they were picking up tonight: He had been listed on the mission brief sheet as Hospital Corpsman First’class Galantz. He was not quite Sherman’s size: five eight, maybe five nine, 150 or 160 pounds.

  Average-sized American military guy, maybe a little more muscle than most, but other than that, altogether unremarkable—except for the way he sat back there, still as a statue, totally self-contained.

  The insertion drill was always the same: After making a big, noisy deal of transiting through the intended drop zone, they’d shut everything down and drift back with the current under the cover of darkness.

  Sometime during the drift, they would feel the stem tip ever so slightly, indicating the SEAL had gone over the side. Sherman shuddered at the very thought of going into the black waters of the Long Tao, a venomous stew of toxic leeches, sea snakes, mangrove pythons, and, of course, the crocs. They must call these guys snake eaters for a reason.

  Three, sometimes four nights later, they would execute the same maneuvers for the pickup. If the guy was a no show, they would try once more the following night. After that, he was on his own. Or dead. Or, worse, much worse, a prisoner. The VC were afraid of the SEALS, and reportedly, they would skin one alive and take a month to do it if they ever captured one.

  Sherman expanded the radar display scale out to a half a mile and scanned the glowing details painted on the radar screen, orienting himself on the bank features leading into the S-turn at the top of the screen. The whine of the motor generator dipped -momentarily when he made the display adjustments. After eleven months, he knew the river pretty well, and he could tell where they were with one quick glance at the radar. There was no point in looking through the windows. As the driver, he had to sacrifice his night vision in favor of the Decca radar screen, like an airplane pilot flying on full instruments. He shifted the scale back to two hundred yards. The Decca was a beauty of a radar.

  At this scale, he could make out individual logs as they bumped along the undercut banks.

  Boss?” said Yank, speaking on the sound-powered intercom.

  “Yeah?” Sherman pulled the mouthpiece up to his lips.

  He kept his eyes on the radar screen and wiped a curtain of sweat off his lower face to keep from shorting out the phones.

  “Ain’t we awfully close here? I can hear the freakin’ frogs.”

  “Yeah, well, you wanta paddle? We do a drift ex, we go where the river takes us. Just let me know when our guy is back, and we’ll didi-mau the hell out of here.”

  “I hear that,” Ryker chipped in. “Okay, knock it off, everybody,”

  Sherman ordered.

  “Only targets make noise in the Rung Sat at night.”

  The circuit went quiet. Sherman knew everyone was tense, and the urge to talk was strong. But -sounds carried on the river. The radar showed that they were only fifty, sixty feet away from the right bank. He flipped on the Fathometer just to make sure. The orange water-depth marker flickered at thirty feet. About right. He shut off the Fathometer and wiped off some more sweat. Another thirty, forty minutes and he’d call it off, which was the decision Yank undoubtedly had been trying to provoke with his question.

  But they had to give the snake eater a decent shot at getting back.

  There was no telling where he would come out of the weeds, or in what condition.

  After a year of operations, and despite what the Saigon propaganda boys said,’all the Swifties knew that the Rung Sat at night was Charlie’s country. It was an area of dense mangrove swamp, encompassing the bulk of the jungle twenty miles on either side of the Long Tao and extending from Saigon to the sea. It was mostly water, littered with small hummocks of semi-dry land.. By day, the American Army helos and the Navy’s Swift boats owned the Long Tao and the surrounding bayou channels. By night, however, it was all up for grabs. Charlie came out of his spider holes and island tunnel complexes to move his endless ant columns of guerrilla logistics. Precious rice and dried fish went north to the cadres fighting up-country. Ammunition, weapons, wounded, and replacements moved south. All movement in the Mekong Delta at large meant boats-usually small sampans powered by ancient FRENCH outboards, which the VC piloted in the darkness through the twisting network of side streams and mud flats. It was the American gunboats’ mission to prowl the rivers at night like big gray water spiders lurking out on the river, spiders with magic Decca eyes. Ordinarily, the Swift boats would skulk along the main channels, waiting with muffled engines until a sampan got itself smack out in the middle of the river. Then the gunboats would thunder to life and swoop down, searchlights stabbing out to transfix the small boat with its four or five occupants. The lights would be followed by the hellish roar of the-twin 50s tearing men, supplies, and the boat to pieces, until the wreckage disappeared under the bows of the gunboat. Then, searchlights off, reverse course, and tear up the banks on either side with the 50s and the big mortar to keep any support troops’ heads down. After a minute or so of suppression fire, slow down and retrieve some evidence of the kill-bits of boat, clothes, body parts, boxes of supplies bobbing in the water. Body parts were tough: This had been going on for long enough that the crocs now knew what all the noise meant. Body parts, you did with a boat hook, and there were times you relinquished the boat hook if a big-enough croc clamped onto it at a critical moment.

  The crews of the Swift boat were not briefed on what the SEALS were doing out there in the Rung Sat, but everyone in the division had a pretty good idea. Word was that these uys would lay up in the trees for’a day and a night, watching the bad guys, identifying the officers, and then slip into the VC hideouts at night to knife the officers.

  Sherman shuddered again. He co
uld not imagine what kind of guy could do that. Yes, you can, he thought. Just remember those eyes.

  Galantz submerged again, listening for the whine. And there it was-very faint, but definitely there. To the right, up stream of his tree. Now he had to wait until the whine drifted closer, because he’d be swimming underwater, and he didn’t want to misjudge the distance and have to surface like some noisy fish out there within Charlie’s AK-47 range. He pushed his face above the surface again, lots more room now, and began deep breathing. Then, just to be sure, he felt for the gap again, leaning down, his chin touching the surface of the water, reaching with his left hand for the top of the gap. There. Good. And then he felt something, a sensation of pressure from just outside the root cage, something moving in the water. In the split second of recognition, there came an excruciating clamp of pain on his left hand, pain so intense, he nearly blacked out with the effort to stifle his scream. And then the croc started tugging, trying to pull his meat prize out of the mangrove cage. Galantz pulled back, saw a white-hot flare of pain before his eyes, and got his head underwater just in time to release the scream, a horrible burbling sound that he hoped would be muffled under the water even as he set his legs and grabbed out at the slippery roots with ‘ his right hand for a purchase. But he knew what would happen next. The croc would start rolling to convert the clamping bite to a detached gobbet of meat.

  Letting go with his right hand, he surfaced for a final breath, bent down, face underwater, and grabbed the croc’s muzzle.

  Hooking desperate fingers into the fold of skin behind the jaw, he set his legs and pulled back, straining hard, trying to get enough of the croc’s head into the root cage so he could stand up, get another breath, and then force the croc’s head up against the opening, pin it, and get to his knife.

  The croc pulled back, and he thought his left hand was going with it, but then he managed to grab one of the croc’s front legs and pull hard, leveraging the pull with his leg and thigh muscles, and this time he got the croc’s head through the bars. His left hand was numb, dead, along with his forearm, maybe almost gone even, except the croc was still there. He was a dead man unless he got this croc off his hand.