by Eric Helm
A huge paddle-bladed ceiling fan hung overhead, there was a small radio in the corner plugged into one of the room’s two electrical outlets and Gerber had finally consented to a telephone on his desk. True, it was only a field phone and connected only with the tiny switchboard Sergeant Bocker had built in the communications bunker, but through it Gerber could speak to almost any part of the camp. Also, when the land lines were intact, which wasn’t often, he could even be patched into the military telephone network and talk to Saigon or Nha Trang, although the calls were frequently routed in a somewhat bizarre manner. It might, for instance, be necessary to go through Cam Tho, Vinh Long, Moc Hoa, Tay Ninh and Bien Hoa to reach Colonel Alan Bates’s office at B-Team Headquarters in Saigon. That was on a good day.
Morrow looked at the hopelessly cluttered desktop, piled with requisitions, advisories, MACV directives and reports, the bureaucratic paper refuse of running a war, and shook her head in amazement.
“Sort of makes you wonder how they get any fighting done,” she muttered.
There was no place to put the bottle.
She looked around for the upended ammo crate Gerber used as a nightstand, but found it covered with science fiction novels and a copy of A Field Guide to the Fungi of Southeast Asia. She wasn’t sure if the guide was a mushroom hunter’s handbook or something designed for the serious mycologist and decided she didn’t care.
She considered leaving the bottle on his bunk, but was afraid he might come in and toss something on top of it without noticing it. Soldiers coming in tired from the field frequently weren’t the most observant of people once they got inside the safety of the camp’s perimeter.
Finally she remembered that Gerber used to keep his spare Beam’s in his wall locker. That, of course, was before his hootch had burned with most of the rest of the old camp, but it was possible that old habits hadn’t changed. It was worth a try. She walked over to the locker. There was no padlock on the door, so she tried the handle. It swung open easily.
Inside, in contrast to the general chaos of his hootch, Gerber’s spare equipment and uniforms were neatly hung on pegs or hangers. She checked the top shelf, but it contained only a helmet, a ranger-type patrol cap and, wrapped in plastic bags, several new green berets with the Fifth Special Forces flash sewn on them.
For a moment, Morrow wondered why Gerber would have so many berets, and then it dawned on her. They wouldn’t be Gerber’s. At least not exactly. He would have bought them, to be sure, but he was merely holding them in trust. They belonged to people like Bill Schattschneider and Steve Kittredge, Ian McMillan and Sean Cavanaugh and young Miles Clarke and the strange-acting ‘Vampire’ Schmidt. Master Sergeant Fetterman had told her once that Gerber saw to it that a fresh green beret accompanied the bodies of each of them when they were sent home for burial. It was their captain’s way of paying his final respects to the men who had fought and died alongside him. The hats on the shelf would be for those who had yet to fall.
Morrow didn’t like thinking about the hats. It made her feel uneasy. What if one of them was there to accompany Gerber home? She didn’t want to think about that.
She was about to close the door to the locker when she realized she hadn’t checked the drawers in the bottom. She bent and pulled one out, but the top drawer contained only underwear, which Gerber, indeed all of the men, never wore on patrol because its only effect in the hot, humid environment of Vietnam was to chafe the wearer something fierce. Morrow couldn’t help thinking that at least Gerber owned a change of underwear while Emilie Brouchard apparently did not.
Morrow tried the second drawer and was rewarded for her efforts. Along with all the neatly rolled pairs of socks was an untapped bottle of Beam’s Choice and a box of those small cigars Gerber rarely smoked but insisted on having around to chew on when he was immersed in the planning of any new mission. To Morrow they smelled like baby owl feathers. When smoked, they smelled even worse.
Morrow had to move the cigar box slightly to fit the second bottle of Beam’s into the drawer. That was how she found the letter.
It might have been anything; it was just a small scrap of white paper sticking out from under a corner of the cigar box. Morrow couldn’t say what made her do it. Perhaps it was her journalistic training. Perhaps it was just natural human curiosity. It wasn’t as though she intended to go snooping in Gerber’s locker. But something made her move the box and look at the envelope, and when she did, the familiar handwriting hit her like a slap in the face.
Stunned, Morrow stared at the light blue ink in the looping slant with the Seattle address she knew so well. With a slowly growing sense of horrified fascination, her eyes moved to the post office cancellation. The date was only a little over two weeks ago.
Morrow knew that it wasn’t nice to read other people’s mail without their permission, yet it would have been a strong character indeed with the determination to resist under the circumstances. Kneeling before the locker, she carefully placed the bottle of Beam’s to one side, then gently lifted out the envelope, as though she were afraid the thing might suddenly bite her.
Morrow removed the two lavender sheets with a studied deliberation, noting with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that they smelled faintly of her sister’s favorite brand of perfume. She unfolded them cautiously and glanced at the greeting and signature of the letter, feeling the sinking feeling slowly solidify into a cold, hard mass.
With a mask of grim determination upon her face, Robin Morrow read through her sister Karen’s letter to the man that Robin loved. She read it through twice to make sure she hadn’t misunderstood anything, but she understood it all with painful clarity. When she had finished with the letter, Morrow knew that, as far as Mack Gerber was concerned, she’d been worried about the wrong woman.
Morrow carefully refolded the letter, placed it back in the envelope and returned the envelope to its spot beneath the cigar box. Gerber’s aloofness wasn’t at all hard to understand now.
“Damn you, Kari. How could you do this to me?” breathed Morrow softly. “You said he didn’t matter to you.”
Morrow carefully rearranged the drawer and closed it, stood and examined the entire locker. Satisfied that she had disturbed nothing, she closed the locker door, picked up the bottle of Beam’s she had brought as a present and walked out the door of Gerber’s hootch and back to her own quarters. Once inside, she sat down on her bunk, put the bottle of Beam’s between her legs and leaned her head back against the wall. Only then did she allow the tears to fill her eyes.
CIA operative Jerry Maxwell huddled over a plate of mu shu pork and chicken fried rice in the back upstairs room of a small Chinese restaurant in Saigon’s Cholon district, contemplating the end of his seventeen-year-long career in government service, if not his life.
Since he had dropped Robin Morrow off at her hotel around ten last night, Maxwell had been a very busy man. First he had spent nearly two hours bouncing all over Saigon in Lambrettas, in taxis, by bus and on foot, shaking the tail he and Morrow had picked up as they’d left the restaurant after supper. It hadn’t been an easy task, but then Maxwell hadn’t expected it to be. The man following him was the man who had taught Maxwell how not to be lost when you were spotted tailing someone.
Maxwell hadn’t known that because he’d seen the man’s face. Jack Jirasek wasn’t the kind of man to make that kind of mistake. Indeed, Maxwell was having a hard time deciding whether or not his spotting the tail had been a mistake at all. Back in the old days in Berlin there had been a saying that you didn’t spot Jack the Ripper unless he wanted you to, and by then it was too late.
So Maxwell had first had to resolve in his own mind the thorny issue of whether or not Jirasek had chosen to expose himself in such a manner as an unorthodox method of establishing contact. Maxwell had considered that carefully while taking Morrow back to her hotel and had decided that it just didn’t wash. They were in Saigon, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t as though they had to play by Moscow r
ules. Furthermore, Jirasek hadn’t shown his face, which he would have if he’d wanted Maxwell to slip away and make contact. Maxwell had only realized he was being tailed when they’d left the restaurant, not who was tailing him. He hadn’t realized who the shadow must be until he’d had such a damned hard time losing him.
He’d finally taken the time to ponder all of it in a crowded smoke-filled bar just off Le Loi Street, once he’d felt reasonably certain he’d lost the tail. It had been a noisy place, full of Vietnamese and off-duty American servicemen and bar girls offering conversation and perhaps something more for the soldier unwary enough to take them up on it. It hadn’t been a place that was really what you’d call conducive to clear, rational thought, which might, perhaps, Maxwell told himself now, account for the very paranoid-sounding conclusions he had drawn.
But there was no denying certain facts. It was a fact that Maxwell’s boss had been in-country for two days and hadn’t tried to contact him. For a station chief’s boss to do that was like spitting in Maxwell’s face. Among the old eastern school tie crowd that ran the upper echelons of the Company, it was considered to be very bad form.
Maxwell, an outsider who had grown up in public schools in New Jersey and made it into Columbia on the strength of an academic scholarship where he’d majored in languages and East European politics, had no such preconceived notions of effrontery.
A fact which, along with his innate intelligence, had made it easy for him to shift his special field of interest to the Far East when the Orient began to look like a more interesting area to work in.
To Maxwell, Jirasek’s behavior simply meant that his superior didn’t want Maxwell to know what was going on. That could only mean one of three things. Either Maxwell was being cut out because he had come under suspicion, which was ridiculous because there hadn’t been as big a patriot as Maxwell since Nathan Hale, or Jirasek was running some kind of a maverick mission on his own, without the knowledge or official sanction of the home office, or it was a wild card play, an ultrasecret, one-time operation that, because of the political ramifications if it were blown, demanded that the doctrine of plausible deniability be in effect. In other words, an operation that, although endorsed at the highest levels of the Company, demanded that it appear Jirasek was working on his own so that responsibility could be denied if anything went wrong.
The fact that Jirasek had come back into harness to run the operation personally and from the field didn’t help greatly to differentiate between the two latter alternatives. If it were a maverick, Jirasek might be limited in the number of people he felt he could trust or might not wish to involve others who would be hurt by the fallout if the play went sour. If it were a wild card, it seemed unlikely that the home office in Langley would want to risk a man of Jirasek’s caliber. But if the potential benefits were great enough, the Company was perfectly capable of throwing even bigger managers than Jirasek to the wolves. The potential payoff would have to be pretty awesome for that, though.
So why had Jirasek suddenly decided to shadow Maxwell? Again the possibility that Maxwell was under suspicion had to be rejected. Jirasek would have sent somebody to do the job, not come himself, unless Jirasek himself were under suspicion as well, in which case he wouldn’t be shadowing Maxwell in the first place.
The only common denominator in the whole mess was the reporter. Jirasek had gone to see Crinshaw three times. Morrow had gone to see Crinshaw to ask what he knew about Emilie Brouchard. Crinshaw had told her what he knew. Only Crinshaw didn’t know shit about Brouchard. Maxwell had seen to that. Still, Maxwell was beginning to think sending her on the mission had been a mistake. But she had been available and knew the area, and Gerber’s team was going to need all the help they could get, if the reports from the LRRPs were any indicator. And then Morrow had come to see Maxwell, and the next thing Maxwell knew it had come full circle and he was being tailed by Jirasek, who had been conducting secret meetings with Crinshaw.
And bingo! Crinshaw was somehow the key to the mystery. He had to be. He was the only person that all the others had been in contact with.
So Maxwell had done the only reasonable thing for a conscientious chief of station in his position. He’d avoided going back to his apartment or office or any other of his well-established hangouts, he’d called on a few friends he’d established outside of the normal networks he’d set up in Vietnam for a little specialized assistance, and he’d begun his own maverick operation.
He had bugged General Crinshaw’s office.
And that move, Maxwell knew, was likely to cost him his career.
What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t find out until tonight when he broke back into Crinshaw’s office and recovered the tape, was what that was going to tell him.
CHAPTER 13
THE CAMBODIAN JUNGLE
Fetterman killed the tracker.
In the final analysis, it proved a fairly easy thing to do, although it didn’t go exactly as planned. Killing all three Viet Cong was a much harder proposition.
Following the agreed-upon plan, Fetterman and Kepler, their hands held high over their heads, stepped onto the trail a few meters ahead of the VC and were followed immediately by Kit carrying the AK-47. There three VC were so startled that they almost dropped their guns. Almost, but not quite.
There ensued immediately a rapid, sing-song conversation between Kit and the three Viet Cong. Fetterman, who had learned all the Vietnamese he knew during his current tour with Gerber’s A-Detachment, could get along fairly well in the language under ordinary circumstances, provided he didn’t have to read much of it and the natives spoke slowly. The convoluted machine-gun prose of Kit and the VC quickly left him behind, however, and he looked to Kepler for some sign that things were okay or seriously amiss.
Kepler had learned his Vietnamese from native instructors at the U.S. Army Language School and had spent his tour in Vietnam polishing it until he could pass for a Vietnamese, provided no one saw his face. That had been the biggest drawback he had experienced in developing his own network of local agents in the countryside around Camp A-555. No matter how well he could speak Vietnamese, he still didn’t look like one.
But Kepler gave no indication that the conversation was going either way, and Fetterman had to content himself with the knowledge that at least they hadn’t started shooting at them yet. He was able to pick out a few bits and pieces of the conversation and gathered that Kit was telling them a story that was uncomfortably close to the truth about their mission and strength, but quickly got lost again when she started telling, with obvious enthusiasm, a complex tale about how she had come to be in the area and had captured Fetterman and Kepler.
After a moment, some sort of argument seemed to develop, accompanied by much animated gesturing, chiefly involving Fetterman and Kepler. It seemed to be a debate over what, exactly, should be done with them. The tracker and the two VC with him obviously wanted to take the prisoners back to the main body of their unit, while Kit apparently was insisting that since she had captured them they were her prisoners and should be taken back to her camp, where there were both a field grade officer and a political cadre who could decide how to dispose of the Yankee pigs.
She also stressed the possibility of capturing, through speedy pursuit, the other soldiers who had been with Fetterman and Kepler and seemed quite convincing in her hatred of all things American, especially Fetterman and Kepler, coming forward to kick and shove the two Green Berets closer to the Viet Cong. Fetterman noted that for such a diminutive woman, she packed a vicious kick, and wondered how big the bruise might be later as he mentally gauged the distance to the tracker and calculated how many tenths of a second it would take him to draw the knife, and how long after that to make the kill.
It occurred to Fetterman that the entire procedure might be taking too long and that the rest of the VC unit might, at any minute, decide not to wait any longer and come ahead across the defoliated, burned strip of ground. Anderson and Washington, along with a
couple of the Tais, would be positioned to prevent that from happening, but how long they would be able to hold them would depend on the enemy numbers, even with all that open ground to cross. And if the VC turned out to have mortars with them, as VC frequently did, you could just pretty well forget the ball game.
Gradually the distance closed.
Kit suddenly kicked Fetterman in the back of the knee, giving him a shove that forced him to his knees, but did bring him a couple feet closer to his target. It wasn’t a good position to launch an attack from, but it would have the advantage of additional surprise, since he looked pretty helpless on his knees. Kit gave Kepler a shove forward as well, practically screaming a stream of very imaginative obscenities at them. Fetterman thought she really was overdoing it a bit. If she got too noisy, the rest of the VC unit, wherever it was, was bound to hear and come running to investigate. Fetterman couldn’t help wondering if that was what she had in mind.
They were nearly within range now. A single step would carry Fetterman to within striking distance of his target, although he would have to come up off the ground first to do it. Kepler was perhaps two steps from his man, but was on his feet. The problem was the third VC. While the tracker and the other one seemed quite happy to argue with Kit over the fate of the two Americans, the third VC insisted on remaining back a little to one side. He seemed a bit uncertain, perhaps even wary of the two Americans. He twisted his rifle nervously in his hands and looked back over his shoulder a lot.
It was Kit who finally broke the stalemate. She stepped past the first two and started shouting at the nervous one. Fetterman gathered it was an appeal to the third man to get him to side with Kit in her argument with the other two. The confusion drew the attention of the two men closest to Fetterman and Kepler for a fraction of a second, and when it did, Kit buttstroked the third with her AK-47.
