The Throat

by Peter Straub

“I’m going,” I said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  He dropped his hands.

  He stayed on the lawn until I got into the car. Then he turned himself around and trudged back toward his house.

  I went back to Ely Place and my real work.

  PART

  EIGHT

  COLONEL

  BEAUFORT RUNNEL

  1

  ILET MYSELF into the house and called out a greeting. The answering silence suggested that the Ransoms were all napping. For a moment I felt like Goldilocks.

  In the kitchen I found the yellow flap of a Post-It note on the central counter beside a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and three glasses smeary with red fluid. Tim—Where are you? We’re going to a movie, be back around 7 or 8. Monroe and Wheeler dropped in, see evidence upstairs. John.

  I dropped the note into the garbage and went upstairs. Marjorie had arranged little pots and bottles of cosmetics on the guest room table. A copy of the AARP magazine lay splayed open on the unmade bed.

  Nothing had been disturbed in John’s bedroom, except by John. He had stashed his three-hundred-dollar vodka on the bedside table, no doubt to keep Ralph from sampling it. Shirts and boxer shorts lay in balls and tangles on the floor. Byron Dorian’s two big paintings, powerful reminders of April’s death, had been taken down and turned to the wall.

  On the third floor, Damrosch’s satchel still lay underneath the couch.

  I crossed the hall into April’s office. A pile of corporate reports had been squared away, and old faxes lay stacked on the shelves. I finally noticed that most of the white shelves were bare.

  Monroe and Wheeler had packed up most of April’s files and papers and taken them away. By nightfall, an Armory Place accountant would be examining her records, looking for a motive for her murder. Monroe and Wheeler had probably emptied her office at Barnett that morning. I pulled open a desk drawer and found two loose paper clips, a tube of Nivea skin cream, and a rubber band. I was a couple of hours too late to discover what April had learned about William Damrosch.

  I went back to John’s office and picked up Colonel Runnel’s book. Then I stretched out on the couch to read until the Ransoms came back from the movies.

  2

  HAPPILY UNAWARE OF THE DISADVANTAGES of being a terrible writer with nothing to say, Beaufort Runnel had martialed thirty years of boneheaded convictions, pointless anecdotes, and heartfelt prejudices into four hundred pages. The colonel had ordered himself to his typewriter and carved each sentence out of miserable, unyielding granite, and it must have been infuriating for him when no commercial publisher would accept his masterpiece.

  I wondered how Tom Pasmore had managed to find this gem.

  Colonel Runnel had spent his life in supply depots, and his most immediate problems had been with thievery and inaccurate invoices. His long, sometimes unhappy experiences in Germany, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, California, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam had inexorably led him to certain profound convictions.

  3

  THE FINEST FIGHTING FORCE on the globe is beyond doubt the Army of the United States of America. This is cold fact. Valorous, ready to dig in and fix bayonets at any moment, prepared to fight until the last man, this is the Army as we know and love it. Working on many bases around the world over a long and not undistinguished (though unsung) career, the Army has placed me in many “hot” spots, and to these challenges this humble Colonel of the Quartermaster Corps, with his best efforts, has responded. I have seen our fighting forces worldwide, at ease and under pressure, and never have they deserved less than my best and most devoted efforts.

  What makes our Army the foremost in the world? Several factors, each of them important, come into play when we ask this question.

  Discipline, which is forged in training.

  Loyalty, our American birthright.

  Strength, physical and of numbers.

  Here I skipped a handful of pages.

  I will recount some experiences in setting up a well-stocked, orderly depot in places around the world by way of explanation. I promise the reader that the amusing “touches” are in no way the inventions or embellishments of the author. This is the way it happened, from the twin perspectives of long experience and the front porch of my modest but comfortable retirement home in a racially unified section of Prince George’s County, Maryland.

  4

  GROANING, I TURNED TO RUNNEL at Cam Ranh Bay, Runnel in Saigon, Runnel in the field. Then a familiar place-name caught in my eye like a fishhook. Runnel had been at Camp White Star, my first stop in Vietnam. I saw another name I knew and started reading in earnest.

  5

  IT WAS DURING my overburdened weeks at Camp White Star that one of the single most unpleasant events of my career took place. Unpleasant and revealing it was, for it told me in no uncertain terms that the old army I loved had fallen prey to unhealthy ideas and influences. Noxious trends were loose in its bloodstream.

  Here I began skimming again, and turned a couple of pages.

  I had, of course, heard of the Green Berets created by the Catholic demagogue put into office by the corrupt expenditure of his father’s ill-gained millions, as who had not? This was trumpeted throughout the land, and many otherwise bright and patriotic young fellows tumbled into the trap. But I had never come into contact with the breed until a certain Captain, later, incredibly, Major, Franklin Bachelor entered my depot at Camp White Star. It was an education.

  He strode in, in no discernible uniform but clearly an officer with an officer’s bearing. One gave leeway to the men in the field. I should explain the normal procedure, at least as I ran my operations. It can be stated in one simple maxim. Nothing in without paperwork, nothing out without paperwork. That is the basis. Of course, every Quartermaster has known what it is to “improvise,” and I, when called upon to do so, acquitted myself splendidly, as in the case of the six oxen of Cho Kin Reservoir. The reader will remember the episode. I rest my case.

  In the normal instance, papers are presented at the desk, the goods requested are assembled and then loaded into the waiting vehicle or vehicles, and copies of the forms are sent to the relevant authority. It goes without saying that Captain Bachelor observed none of the usual amenities.

  He ignored me and began ordering his minions to take articles of clothing from the shelves. These were, emphatically, not soldiers of the United States Army. Aboriginal in stature, ugly in face and form, some even smeared gaudily with dye. Such were the “Yards,” the tribesmen with whom many Green Berets were forced to consort. My command to return the stolen goods to the shelves was completely ignored. I struck my counter and asked, in what I hoped was an ironic tone, if I might see the officer’s requisition forms. The man and his goons continued to ignore me. Whirling, bestial little creatures daubed in mud and crested with feathers had taken over my depot.

  I emerged from behind the counter, sidearm conspicuously in hand. This, I said, was not acceptable, and would cease forthwith. I approached the officer and as I did so heard from behind me the sound of an M16 being readied to fire. The officer advised me to remain calm. Slowly, very slowly indeed, I turned to face one of the most astounding spectacles with which the Asian conflict had thus far provided me. A woman of considerable beauty, dressed in conventional fatigues, held the weapon pointed at my head. She too was a “Yard,” but more highly evolved than her scampering compatriots. I knew two things almost at once: this beauty would shoot me where I stood, with the well-known Asian indifference to life. Secondly, she was the mate of the Green Beret officer. I use no more elevated word. They were mates, as creatures of the barnyard are mates. This indicated to me that the officer was insane. I relinquished all resistance to the pair and their tribe. My staff had scattered, and I stood mute.

  I proceeded on the instant to the office of the commanding officer, a gentleman who shall remain nameless. He and I had had our disagreements over the course of my reorganization of various matters. Despite our differences, I exp
ected full and immediate cooperation. Restoration of the stolen goods. Full reports and documentation. Disciplinary action appropriate to the deed. To my amazement, the CO at White Star refused to lift a finger.

  I had merely been visited by Captain Franklin Bachelor, I was told. Captain Bachelor stopped in once every two years or so to outfit his soldiers. The Captain never bothered with paperwork, the Quartermaster assessed what had been taken and filled out the forms himself. Or he wrote it off to pilferage. My problem was that I tried to stop him—you couldn’t stop Captain Bachelor. I enquired why one could not, and received the stupefying reply that the Captain was a legend.

  It was this asinine CO who told me that Franklin Bachelor was known as “The Last Irregular.” Irregular, indeed, I allowed sotto voce.

  As the reader will understand, I thenceforth took a great interest in the developing career of young Captain Franklin Bachelor.

  I declared myself a convert to such as Bachelor, a partisan of the “Irregulars.” I probed for tales, and heard such stories as those with which the Moor did seduce Desdemona.

  The picture that emerged from the tales about Bachelor became disturbing. If so for me, how much more so for Those Who Must Not Be Named, who had encouraged him? Incalculably, yes. It was because of this disturbance, registered in the highest places in the land, that the hapless Jack (I believe) Ransom, a Captain of Special Forces, first became enmeshed in the insane Bachelor’s treacherous web, resulting in the final conspiracy—the ultimate conspiracy—of silence. From which silence, leaks an undying shame. I intend to expose it in these pages.

  6

  THE TASK OF A MAN like Bachelor was to exploit the existing hostility between ordinary Vietnamese and local tribesmen by organizing individual tribal villages into virtual commando units, strike forces capable of the same stealth as our guerilla enemy. Another goal was to win support for our government by actively assisting the life of the villager. To build dams, to dig wells, to develop healthier crops. It was imperative that these men speak the language of their tribesmen, live as they did, eat the food they ate. The goal was the training of guerilla soldiers to be used in guerilla warfare.

  Bachelor soon showed his true colors by turning his villagers into a travelling wolf pack. After several months, the pack established permanent camp deep in a valley of the Vietnamese highlands.

  It was at this time that Bachelor’s reputation was at its peak. The ordinary soldier idealized Bachelor’s achievements. His superiors valued him because he consistently provided intelligence on the movements of the enemy. The rogue elephant kept in communication with the pack.

  Here we come to the heart of the matter.

  It is my belief that Bachelor had begun to dip into that most dangerous of waters, the role of intermediary—you could say, double agent.

  Operating first from his secret base in the highlands and then an even more heavily defended redoubt further north, Major Bachelor became a trafficker in information, a source for intelligence about troop movements and military strategy that could be gained in no other way.

  Even I, deep in my duties, heard of instances in which our forces went out to surprise a battalion of North Vietnamese, reported (by Whom?) to be making its way south by devious routes, only to encounter no more than a few paltry squads. Were we victorious? Absolutely. On the scale to which we had been led, by our intelligence, to expect? The response is negative. It must have been some such reasoning that caused They Who Must Not Be Named to dispatch a young Special Forces Captain, Jack Ransom, into the highlands to contact Major Bachelor and return him to the leafy vales of suburban Virginia for interrogation and debriefing.

  7

  MY FEET HURT, and my back never gives me a moment’s peace. Writing is as I have found an activity draining, depleting, and infinitely interruptable. No sooner does a good sentence billow up to the mind’s forefront, than some wretch appears at the door of my modest but comfortable retirement cottage in a sensible sector of Prince George’s County. He is delivering an unwanted package, he is begging for food, he is looking for some phantom person represented by an illegible name scribbled on a dirty scrap of paper. I return to my desk, attempting to recapture the lost words, and the telephone goes off like an exploding shell. When I answer the demonic thing, a heavily accented voice inquires if I really do wish the delivery of twenty-four mushroom and anchovy pizzas.

  And! At all hours a juvenile from the neighboring house, a once presentable house now gone sadly to seed, is likely to be throwing a tennis ball against the wall before my desk, retrieving the ball, hurling it again at my wall, so that a steady drumming of THUMP THUMP THUMP intercedes between me and my thoughts. The child’s parents own no sense of decorum, duty, discipline, or neighborly feeling. On the one occasion I visited their pestiferous hovel, they greeted my complaints with jeers. It is, I am certain, from these pathetic folk that the pizza orders, etc, etc, originate. I hereby inscribe their name so that it may reverberate with shame: Dumky. Is this what we fought for, that a whey-faced, slat-sided, smudge-eyed spawn of the Dumkys is free to hurl a tennis ball at my modest dwelling? When a man is trying to write in here, a man already working against backache and sore feet, sweating over his words to make them memorable?

  There it goes, the tennis ball. THUMP THUMP THUMP.

  8

  THE READER WILL FORGIVE the above outburst. It is this damnable subject that raises my ire and my blood pressure, not my squalid neighbors.

  I heard from many of my confidants that Ransom and another officer were sent into the highlands to locate Bachelor and bring him, as they say, “in from the cold.” They Who Must Not Be Named wished to question the man, but doomed their own venture by permitting word of Ransom’s mission to reach Bachelor before the Captain did himself. This can happen in a thousand ways—a whisper in the wrong ear, an overseen cable, an ill-advised conversation in the officers’ club. The results were foreseeable but tragic nonetheless.

  After a difficult and dangerous journey, Ransom succeeded in locating the degenerate officer’s secret encampment. I have heard differing versions of what he came upon, some of which I reject on grounds of sheer implausibility. I believe that Ransom and his fellow officer entered the camp and came upon a scene of mass carnage. Bodies of men and women littered the camp—their prey had fled.

  What followed was another strange increment in the legend of Franklin Bachelor. Captain Ransom entered a roofless shed and discovered a Caucasian American male in the remains of a military uniform cradling the stripped and cleaned skull of an Asian female. This man, half-crazed with exhaustion and grief, declared that he was Franklin Bachelor. The skull was his wife’s. He and his subordinate, he said, a Captain Bennington, had been away from the encampment when it had been overrun by the Vietcong who had been searching for him for years—the enemy had slaughtered more than half of his people, burned down the camp, and then boiled the bodies, eaten the flesh, and reduced Bachelor’s people to skeletons. Bennington had pursued the cadre and been killed. When Captain Ransom delivered his man to The Shadows, it was discovered that he was in reality the Captain Bennington supposed murdered by the VC. What had happened was that Franklin Bachelor had actually persuaded his subordinate to submit to interrogation and possible arrest in his place, while Bachelor himself fled into the jungle with the remnant of his wolf pack. Bennington was found to be hopelessly insane, and was confined to a military hospital, where I am sure he repines to this day for his lost commander.

  The official story stops here. Yet an awkward question must be asked. How likely is it that there would be a VC assault on Bachelor’s camp only a short time before the arrival of Captain Ransom? And that Bachelor would behave, in this case, as reported?

  Here is what transpired. Bachelor knew that Captain Ransom was on his way to take him back to the United States for questioning. At that point he murdered his own followers. In cold blood, he dispatched those who could not keep up on a high-speed escape through rough terrain. Women. Childr
en. The old and the weak, all were executed or mortally wounded, along with any able-bodied men who opposed Bachelor’s scheme. Then Bachelor and his remaining men boiled the flesh off some of the bodies and made a last meal of their dead. I believe it is even possible that Bachelor’s people voluntarily accepted death, cooperated in their own destruction. He held them under his sway. They believed he possessed magical powers. If Bachelor ate their flesh, they would live in him.

  9

  BACHELOR RETAINED HIS CORE GROUP of tribesmen, and I have no doubt that not a few of the spinning, whirling savages daubed in mud and covered with feathers who looted my orderly shelves at Camp White Star were among them. Those fellows, barbaric to the core, would be hard to kill and impossible to discourage. To this core group of fanatical savages he had added stray VC and other lawless bandits. They had armed and outfitted themselves so stealthily, and with such deadly force, that the Army that supported it never suspected its existence. What they had been looking for was another secret encampment, far enough north in the rugged, fog-shrouded terrain of I Corps to be safe from accidental discovery by conventional American troops and to be strategically well-positioned for intelligence purposes. Bachelor was now about to begin playing his most dangerous game.

  His legend increased when he began again transmitting infallibly accurate reports of North Vietnamese troop movements from his newfound redoubt. To all intents and purposes, “the Last Irregular” had indeed returned from the dead. His reports concerned the North Vietnamese divisions moving toward Khe Sanh and vicinity.

  The following is a mere outline of the story of Khe Sanh for those unfamiliar with this unhappy episode. Special Forces set up a camp around a French Fort at Khe Sanh in 1964—CIDG, some say at its best. When its airfield became crucially important in 1965, the marines were sent in to Khe Sanh, and for a time shared it with Special Forces and their ragtag battalion of tribesmen. The marines gradually squeezed out the Green Berets, who were unused to dealing with the efficiency, discipline, and superior organization of the Gyrenes. The “Bru” and their masters relocated in Lang Vei, where they built another camp, despite the existence a mere twenty kilometers away in Lang Vo of another CIDG camp of “Bru,” this under the command of Captain Jack Ransom.