Blue Darker Than Black

by Mike Jenne

  With liquor on his breath, his father sternly recited the other salient conditions of the arrangement. If he brought home game with his five bullets, he would receive one .22 caliber bullet a day from then on, and one extra bullet per month, with the understanding that he would bring home meat or suffer the repercussions. A miss would be punished with a beating, but the rifle would remain his.

  As he wiped excess oil from the silenced High Standard automatic, Glades remembered that day as if it were yesterday. As his father explained the simple workings of the bolt action Remington, his mother tended to her hardscrabble garden in their tiny back yard. She picked fat wriggling slugs from vegetables and carefully pruned suckers from tomato plants. Even though autumn was already arriving, she walked barefoot on the damp soil.

  She wasn’t that old; she had married at sixteen, and had borne Glades and his four siblings before she was twenty-one. He was sure that she had once been beautiful, but it was hard to see that beauty through a countenance that was an unvarying mix of bitterness, resentment, and sheer exhaustion.

  Her face was pale white skin stretched taut over high Irish cheekbones and dappled with a constellation of pinpoint black freckles. Her head was crowned with a thick mantle of jet-black hair, as dark as the anthracite coal that came up from the earth below. She was thin, painfully so. Today, such skinniness would become synonymous with beauty, glamorized by a waif-like model named Twiggy. But his mother’s form wasn’t by choice or vanity; her perpetual gauntness was the result of constant hunger allied with the wasting effects of a chronic infestation of hookworms. In the years to come, she would grow thinner still as tuberculosis settled deep in her lungs.

  The following days were filled with disappointment as Glades missed one shot, then another, and yet another. But then he cornered a hissing possum, and dispatched it with his fourth bullet. Elated, he brought the pitiful creature to the door and called for his mother.

  As God’s creatures go, possums aren’t particularly endowed with physical beauty, but his mother wept when she saw the gut-shot marsupial, dripping dark blood from an array of sharp teeth. For the first time in his life, he glimpsed an expression of joy in his mother’s face, probably when she realized that there was a chance that she and her brood might eat more regularly. While he was bursting with pride from his successful hunt, that pleasure quickly faded as he vowed to never again waste a bullet, to always deliver meat to the table so that he could see that same expression on his mother’s face again and again.

  As his mother dressed the possum and sliced it up for their evening meal, Glades cut a small patch of skin, about an inch square, from the animal’s gray hide. He scraped the underlying flesh and fat from the back of his souvenir, and gently rubbed salt into it to preserve it. From that day on, he carried the patch of gray fur with him, like some boys might tote a lucky rabbit’s foot.

  For the next ten years, every morning, rain or shine, snow or sun, Glades carried the Remington with him to school, swaddling it in sackcloth and concealing it in a thicket before he entered the single classroom. On the way to school, he cut through the woods, carefully scanning for tracks and spoor; on the way home, he found and killed his prey. And every day, his grateful mother met him at the door, patiently waiting for the fresh meat that would help nourish her family.

  As the years passed, she doted on her young hunter and provider, treating him much differently than her other children. His siblings hauled water, split firewood, washed dishes, swept floors, shoveled snow, scrubbed laundry, pulled weeds, and performed a multitude of other chores. In stark contrast, Nestor had but one chore, to kill efficiently, and he grew more proficient at his singular task with every day that passed.

  Sometimes, his mother sang to him as she chopped potatoes and vegetables for the evening stew. As he grew still older, she patiently struggled to teach him the Gaelic poems and Irish dances she had learned from her mother and grandmother. In his efforts to please her, he clumsily tried to follow along, stumbling through jigs and butchering the language of the ancients. But she persisted, insisting that it was important that he knew the ways of his ancestors, that he could never know when such things would come in handy.

  From the day when his father first placed the gun in his hands, Glades endured only four “whuppins” for misusing his daily bullet. Ironically, he suffered one beating—a lighthearted one at best—for killing two fat raccoons with a single shot. It was wasteful, his father insisted, since it was far too much meat for their pot, and they couldn’t afford ice for their wooden icebox.

  Two weeks before his seventeenth birthday, his mother succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. At the funeral, as his stoic father silently wept and his siblings bawled aloud, Glades gazed into the plain wooden coffin and saw that his mother had become beautiful again; her pale face was a masque of serenity and relief. He was even sure that he saw the subtle smile that she shared only with him. And in a tiny church overflowing with grief and the grieving, he felt no need to cry in his mother’s passing.

  The next day, he hitched a ride to Morgantown. He sought out an Army recruiter, who allowed him to stay in a back room until he was seventeen. That day, as the grinning recruiter momentarily looked away, Nestor signed his mother’s name on the parental consent form. Ironically, she had never learned to read and write; in her short life, she had left only one signature: an “X” hurriedly scrawled on her marriage license.

  He found his place in the Army, a home where he received all the bullets he could ever hope for. He fought as a paratrooper in Korea, where he earned a Silver Star. He transferred to Special Forces in 1959, served a tour in Laos with Project White Star, and was then picked for an exchange tour with the British Special Air Service. After completing their brutal Selection Course, he accompanied an SAS squadron on an operational mission in Oman, despite explicit orders prohibiting him from participating in combat operations with the Brits.

  Returning from Oman, he met Deirdre at Hereford. She was the nineteen-year-old daughter of the SAS Regimental Sergeant Major. The RSM was an unusual soldier by SAS standards; he was Irish and had served in an Irish Guards tank battalion in the War before coming to the Regiment in the early fifties.

  Glades had first spied her—a petite spitfire with bright red hair and a personality to match—at the Regimental Christmas dinner. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her, and chatted her up by the Christmas tree as she helped pass out presents to the children in attendance. He spent the next few weeks wooing her with the Gaelic poems and songs that his mother had taught him. In her, he found a woman as beautiful and kind as any man could ever hope for, but yet as mentally and physically tough as any man could ever hope to be.

  Barely two months after meeting her, Glades asked the RSM for Deirdre’s hand. The RSM grudgingly conceded, knowing that although the Yank sergeant would take her far away, perhaps never to return, there could be no better man for his daughter. So they were married in the chapel at Hereford, and she later accompanied him to the States. And despite the wars and long separations, they had been together ever since.

  Glades was an unusual fit for Special Forces, even though it was an unconventional organization that traditionally drew the sort of men who found difficulties fitting in elsewhere. Although the nucleus of Special Forces was the tightly knit “A team,” composed of twelve highly qualified soldiers, Glades typically worked most effectively by himself or with just two or three other handpicked men.

  Additionally, although the Special Forces were renowned for their ability to blend into other cultures, Glades quickly found that he had virtually no capacity to learn foreign languages. He could spend days and weeks memorizing words and phrases, much like the Gaelic poems he had learned from his mother, but for some reason they just never seemed to sink in. Context and conjugation were just mysteries to him.

  His inability to learn other languages was a bane upon him. Other Special Forces men joked that if Glades weren’t so damned good at finding stuff and killin
g people, he would have been sent away long ago. Oddly though, he was extremely successful at working with foreign soldiers, communicating mostly through hand signals and pantomime. In the case of his MACV-SOG indig soldiers, once they learned that the surest path to survival was to stay close to Glades and emulate his actions, they actually spent a considerable amount of their own time learning as much English as they could, so that they could effectively communicate with him rather than the other way around.

  For his part, he always contended that he could operate virtually anywhere in the world if he had just four simple expressions in his working vocabulary—Yes, No, Please, and Thank You—along with just a few other simple phrases, like the appropriate numbers from zero to ten. These, reinforced with some mission-specific phrases, like “Be still or I will kill you,” typically sufficed for most of his interactions.

  Others could laugh at his inability to communicate, but they could not question his sometimes uncanny accomplishments. A few years ago, a U-2 spy plane had lost power over the Soviet Union, eventually crashing in southern Uzbekistan. Months after the CIA and other agencies had abandoned the task, Glades was called upon to recover the pilot’s body and destroy sensitive equipment at the remote site. Although the Soviets knew that the highly classified aircraft was somewhere out there, they had yet to find it themselves, even though they were actively looking for it with over a thousand men drawn from a Motorized Rifle Regiment based in Termez.

  Naked, pushing a “poncho raft” containing native clothes and basic supplies, Glades had swum the ice-cold Amu Darya river from neighboring Afghanistan to meet a CIA-contracted Uzbek guide in Soviet territory on the far shore. After making initial contact with the guide, Glades simply drew a cartoon-like picture of the spy plane, pointed to it, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he pointed north and asked, “Where?”

  Accompanied by a small herd of goats, which provided shallow cover for their presence and a reliable food source for the treacherous quest, he and the guide trekked for over three weeks, eventually locating the crash site high in the rugged mountains east of Karshi. In the course of the twenty-three-day search, the two men had not found it necessary to exchange a solitary word.

  Glades smiled as he reflected on the interlude in Uzbekistan. Even though he hadn’t learned even the slightest smattering of the Uzbek language, had almost died, and had lost all desire to ever again taste spit-roasted goat, he had actually enjoyed his sojourn in the remote wilderness. For those three weeks, he was so far out there that his presence couldn’t even be reflected as a colored pin on someone’s map. There were no briefings or debriefings to attend, supply requisition forms to fill out, no equipment to account for, no radio frequencies or map coordinates to memorize. For that brief time, life was simple and good.

  He sighed as he closed the hasps on the footlockers. He reconciled himself with the notion that it was time to go home, and while he longed to see Deirdre and their children, he would miss this place. And beyond that, he would miss the men who would die in the coming weeks and months, mostly because he would not be here to keep them focused and safe.

  As he checked his watch, he heard his One-One’s Bronx accent from outside the teamhouse, “Nestor, come on. The guys are waiting. It’s time to eat peaches.”

  Yeah, mused Glades. It was time to eat peaches.

  4

  PIGEONS

  Woodland Cemetery, Dayton, Ohio

  3:30 p.m., Saturday, August 9, 1969

  Even as he desperately labored to gather information about his primary target, the UFO research agency named Project Blue Book, Soviet GRU Major Anatoly Nikolayevich Morozov was also tasked to perform an initial evaluation of an American airman stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Apparently anxious to do business with his nation’s enemies, the airman—Staff Sergeant Eric Yost—had contacted the Soviet Embassy last month, desiring to sell information about UFOs. As with any potential source, using their embedded contacts within the Air Force personnel system, the GRU had already executed a fairly extensive check of his records.

  Interestingly, the would-be turncoat possessed a Top Secret clearance, so he potentially had access to juicy information, which was why Morozov’s bosses had authorized the evaluation and—if so warranted—recruitment. Otherwise, Yost’s drivel-filled letter and four pictures, which showed several blue coffin-shaped boxes being unloaded from an official station wagon, would be smoldering ashes in the Embassy’s basement furnace.

  Besides Yost’s security clearance, other issues raised some eyebrows within the GRU, particularly given the airman’s proximity to Blue Book. Yost insisted that he could provide tangible evidence of alien spacecraft captured by the US Air Force and stored at Wright-Patterson. Also noteworthy was the location where the photographs were taken, a hangar belonging to the “Aerospace Support Project.” Although the GRU was aware of the organization, no one had a clue about what went on behind its doors.

  If Yost’s information could draw a line between the Aerospace Support Project and Project Blue Book, his recruitment could be fortuitous, perhaps adequate to justify an extension of Morozov’s Ohio mission. If Morozov remained clear of the Embassy long enough, then his intelligence career might be rescued from the monotonous doldrums of file work, making tea, and conducting surveillance on the bored mistresses of obscure US military officials.

  On the other hand, it was equally likely—probably more so, in fact—that Yost would turn out to be just another self-inflated, greedy malcontent. His official records indicated a history of disciplinary troubles resulting from a proclivity for drinking to excess. Maybe Yost wasn’t worth the effort, but then again, as Morozov’s aged mother was apt to point out, mushrooms don’t grow in pots of gold and silver. Consequently, Morozov was doled some operational cash and a substantial amount of leeway to determine whether Yost might be of potential value.

  After going through the preliminary steps of the agent recruitment mating dance and mailing a set of meeting instructions to Yost’s post office box, Morozov was seated on an uncomfortable concrete bench, waiting for the American sergeant to arrive. He watched squirrels sprint anxiously between the tombstones and listened to leaves rustling on tree branches.

  As he waited, Morozov opened a local newspaper and placed it in his lap. That was the safety signal; per the instructions, if Yost saw the paper in Morozov’s lap, he would know that it was secure to meet. If the safety signal was not correctly displayed, Yost should say nothing, walk by, leave the cemetery, and wait for further instructions to be mailed.

  He heard a faint crunching noise and observed a slovenly man slowly approaching on the graveled walkway. The man had a very awkward gait, but Morozov couldn’t determine if it was a pained limp, a drunken stagger, or perhaps a mixture of both. As he drew closer, Morozov saw that the man was unshaven and had short dark hair, was of medium height and very thin. Wearing khaki trousers and a red plaid shirt, he matched the general description of Yost and was wearing the identification colors specified in the instructions for the meeting.

  “Is there a mausoleum near here?” asked the man, clearing his throat and speaking in a quiet monotone. “I’m looking for one of my ancestors.”

  “Have a seat,” ordered Morozov.

  “Eric Yost,” muttered the man, slurring his words as he stuck out a hand.

  Although it was not part of the protocol established for the meeting, the GRU officer shook Yost’s hand. His grip was weak, like a woman’s. It was like he imagined all American handshakes to be. Yost’s foul breath reeked of liquor. “Mr. Yost, have you been drinking?”

  “Is Pope Paul Catholic? Hell yes, I’ve been drinking! It’s Saturday, isn’t it? You want a nip?” Yost held out a silver flask. The flask bore an inscription engraved in cursive script: “To Eric, mit liebe, From Gretchen.”

  Straining to conceal his disgust, Morozov shook his head. What kind of moron would imbibe before a potentially perilous clandestine meeting? “Your identification, please,” he
said.

  Yost took out his wallet and clumsily extracted his Air Force identification card. He tendered the plastic-laminated card to the Soviet officer.

  Cupping it in his hand, Morozov scrutinized the credential and then looked at Yost. It was definitely a match, except that the frowning man in the photograph wore a moustache.

  “It was a phase I was going through last year,” explained Yost, obviously recognizing Morozov’s concern with the discrepancy. “My wife didn’t like it, so I shaved it off. I guess it really doesn’t much matter anymore what that ungrateful bitch thinks.”

  The details also matched what Morozov had read in Yost’s personnel dossier. He gave the card back to Yost. A flock of doves landed in front of the concrete bench, plaintively cooing as they jostled each other on the walkway.

  “I hate pigeons,” observed Yost, shooing one away with his foot before taking a sip from his flask. “Nasty things. They’re like flying rats.”

  “They’re not so bad.” Morozov pulled out a brown paper bag from a jacket pocket and then cast bread crumbs to the ravenous birds. “I like to feed them. In Russia, the old people consider them sacred, a living symbol of the Holy Spirit.”

  “I didn’t think Commies … I mean, Communists … believed in God. So you’re religious?”

  “Not really. Not anymore, anyway. I grew up during the War. We had to eat pigeons and a lot of other things not nearly as pleasant, or we would have starved. We thought of it as taking communion, which made some things a little easier to swallow. Listen—time is short, so let’s get down to business. Do you have something for me, Mr. Yost?”

  Yost nodded. “I have two sets of pictures. Here’s the first set.” He handed Morozov a small stack of color prints and then jammed his hands into his trouser pockets.