Collateral Damage

by H. Terrell Griffin

  The team had been operating for about six months without any losses. They’d hunted and killed Viet Cong leaders targeted by intelligence operatives sitting in Saigon. On the night when it all fell apart, they were sent to the village of Ban Touk near the Laotian border. The word came down that there was a meeting of high-level Viet Cong cadre and the commanders of North Vietnamese Army units hidden just across the border.

  “It was the treasure trove,” said Doc. “The plan was that we’d take out a lot of the enemy leadership, maybe wounding them so deeply that they’d head back north. But it didn’t go that way.”

  The names of the CIA personnel assigned to Thanatos were kept secret. The operatives were known only by a nom de guerre, each one a gemstone. The Team Charlie leader, known to the men as Opal, issued the orders just before the operation began. The team was to surround the village and open fire on his order and then move in and set the huts on fire. Nobody was to leave there alive. That was important, he’d said. One hundred percent casualties. All dead. No exceptions.

  The men crept through the dark. They were in heavily forested mountainous terrain, moving quietly, staying away from the trails that traversed the area, humping it through the woods, silent as the night. They came to the village, if you could call it that. It was just a cleared area with five or six huts, formed into a tight circle. An area of flat ground served as the centerpiece of the community. There were four black-pajama clad men standing around in front of the huts, shifting nervously from foot to foot, their rifles slung over their shoulders. Team Charlie fanned out, surrounding the small assemblage of huts and setting up intersecting lines of fire.

  Opal, the team leader, ordered the men to open fire. The soldiers in the clearing were cut down immediately and the rifle and machine gun bullets began to cut into the huts, chopping them to splinters. No fire was returned. Not a single round.

  “Get in there and fire those huts,” Opal ordered.

  The men moved in, one carrying a blowtorch. “What about documents?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we check that out before we burn the place down?”

  “No. Fire the fucking huts,” said the leader. “Now.”

  The man with the torch, a Marine named Brewster, stopped over a dead VC soldier, shined a flashlight into his face. He shrugged and moved toward the second hut, blowtorch in one hand, rifle in the other, pointing ahead. He went to the door of the hut, used his rifle barrel to push aside a curtain, shined a flashlight inside. A foolhardy move, and one that surely would get him killed. Nothing happened.

  “Doc,” Brewster said, “look at this.”

  Desmond moved swiftly up behind the man, looked over his shoulder. Inside were women and children and two babies, all dead. He went to the shattered bodies to see if his medical skills could save any of them. They were all dead, killed by American bullets. The worst part was that they were gagged and tied to stakes driven into the ground. They could not have ducked had they tried. They were set up.

  Brewster said, “Those guys out there in the black pajamas were about twelve years old. I don’t think they were VC.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” shouted Opal. He was standing in the door of the hut. “I told you to burn this fucking place.”

  “Look here, sir,” said Doc, “these aren’t VC or NVA. They’re women and children. I’m going to check the other huts.”

  “No, you’re not,” said the leader. He was pointing his rifle at Doc.

  “I’ll blow your fucking head off if you don’t follow orders.”

  “Sir,” said Doc, “do you hear what I’m telling you? There are no bad guys. We just killed a bunch of innocent people.”

  “They’re fucking gooks, Desmond. It doesn’t matter.”

  “You knew, didn’t you?” asked Doc.

  “This is war, Desmond. Sometimes there’s collateral damage.”

  “When did you know?”

  “All along. We think the men from the village are being held across the river. But if we hadn’t attacked, we’d have blown our source. If the VC knew that we knew about there being only women and children here, we’d have lost valuable intelligence.”

  “And the VC guards?” asked Brewster.

  “Kids from this village. They were told to act like guards. If they didn’t, their families would be killed.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to us?” asked Doc.

  “If you’d known would you have come on the mission?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “There you have it, soldier,” said Opal, a hard edge to his voice, his rifle still pointing at Doc. “You follow your fucking orders now and fire up this place.”

  “I have a question,” said Brewster.

  “What?”

  “Did Topaz know about this?”

  “Of course. He’s the assistant team leader. If I couldn’t have led tonight, he would have.”

  Brewster shot the leader through the chest. “Oops. More collateral damage,” he said and walked out of the hut. Doc didn’t bother to check the leader’s pulse. If he wasn’t dead, he would be soon, and that was good enough for now. He followed Brewster out into the clearing. The other men had heard the exchange and were just standing there, numbed by what they’d learned. They were soldiers, not murderers.

  “Where’s Opal?” asked the assistant leader.

  “Dead,” said Doc.

  “You killed him?” Panic rode his voice. “You murdering bastard.”

  “You knew there was nothing here, just women and children waiting to be slaughtered,” said Doc. “We just committed a war crime. At your orders. With your full knowledge of what we were doing.”

  “It was necessary,” said Topaz. “This is war.”

  “No,” said Brewster, “this is murder.”

  “Well, fuck you, Brewster,” said Topaz. “Your ass will be in a sling when we get back.”

  “You’re not going back,” said Doc.

  “What?” a hint of fear brought a quiver to Topaz’s voice.

  “I think you’re about to be killed in the line of duty.”

  “Hey, wait a fucking minute.” Topaz started backing up, hands in front of him. Doc looked at the other men, one at a time. Each one nodded. Once. Each raised his rifle. Pointed it at the assistant. Doc and Brewster joined them.

  “No,” screamed Topaz. “You can’t do this.”

  Doc nodded. The men fired one volley, killing the assistant team leader with ten bullets.

  Doc sat quietly, drained by the story and the memory. “I’ve never told this tale to anyone. I could still be prosecuted for murder, I guess, but it was the right thing to do. At least that’s what I’ve always told myself.”

  “What happened after you left the bush?” I asked.

  “We all swore an oath of secrecy. Never tell anybody what happened. If one of us went down, we’d all go down. We got back to base camp and reported that we’d run into an unexpected firefight. Opal and Topaz were in the lead and were killed by the first shots fired from ambush. The brass didn’t believe us, and we were interrogated by CIA types, over and over for the next week. We all stuck to our story, so there was nothing they could do. They knew we were lying, because they knew what the operation was really about. But they couldn’t break any of us.”

  “What happened to the bodies?” I asked.

  “We put Opal and the Topaz in one of the huts with the other bodies. A night wind was blowing and it fueled the fire. They went up very quickly. We told the CIA that we’d been unable to recover their bodies after the firefight, but that we’d carried out our mission. None of those guys were about to hump back into the bush to check out that village. They knew, but they couldn’t prove a damn thing.”

  Jock said, “My agency sent me a list of the team members the director got from somewhere in the bowels of our intelligence network. I didn’t bother to follow up on the dead team members. Doc, do you know who they were?” He handed the list to Doc.

  “I knew the three who died after th
ey came home. They were good men. The two you show as killed in Vietnam were obviously the team leaders, Opal and Topaz.”

  “You never had any idea of who they really were?” Jock asked.

  “No. We knew they were CIA. That’s all. When we weren’t in the field, they disappeared. I always assumed they went back to Saigon to report in and enjoy a little time at the officer’s club.”

  “We need to find their names,” said Jock. “Once we know who they are, I may be able to backtrack and find out who their friends were and if any of those friends still work for the CIA. It’s a start, but it may take a while.”

  “I don’t think we have that kind of time,” said Doc.

  “What about the teams?” asked Logan. “What happened to them?”

  “They were all disbanded, I think. Team Charlie sure was. We were sent home and discharged within a week of the operation. We had to sign a lot of paperwork swearing ourselves to secrecy about the whole Thanatos thing. As far as I know, not one of us ever talked about it, and not one of us has had any contact with any of the other team members. Not until last weekend, anyway.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  On Saturday afternoon, Doc had been playing golf in Atlanta with the manager of his Birmingham office. The manager happened to mention that a friend of his in Birmingham had lost a twenty-year-old son a couple of weeks ago. Shot to death in the parking lot of a bar. By a sniper. Said his friend was a prominent lawyer and wondered if Doc knew him. Harrison Fleming. Doc lied and told him he didn’t know the man.

  Doc, of course, knew Fleming, a member of the team, a man he hadn’t seen since he left Vietnam. He thought it too big a coincidence that two members of Team Charlie had lost sons to snipers in the space of a couple of months. He needed to talk to Fleming, see if any of the other team members were in danger.

  Doc was concerned that somehow the past was coming back to exact vengeance. He didn’t know who the perpetrators were or why they would kill the team members’ children rather than the members themselves. But the CIA has a long memory, and the teams had been run by young men. Their friends would now be in the upper echelons of the agency and maybe they’d decided to seek revenge. Take care of the team members who’d killed their buddies. Maybe the children were just the first casualties.

  Before the team had been split up and sent home, the men had agreed not to seek each other out except in a dire emergency. In that case, they had a code phrase that would immediately alert the members: Opal is on the move.

  Doc called Fleming at home on Saturday evening. When the phone was answered, he heard party noises, soft music, the hum of conversation, distant laughter. “Flem, this is Doc. Opal is on the move. Go to a pay phone and call this number.” The number was assigned to a disposable cell phone Desmond had bought months earlier.

  Ten minutes later it rang. “Doc, you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Flem. I heard about your boy. I’m sorry. My son was killed by a sniper on a beach in Florida a couple of months ago.”

  “Geez, I’m sorry, man.”

  “Thanks. I don’t think their deaths are a coincidence. I’m not sure what’s going down, but it’s probably connected to the teams. Can you get your family to safety? Tonight? To a place nobody would think to look?”

  “Yes. There’re all at my house for my other son’s birthday. I can have them gone in an hour. My son-in-law’s family has a home in Colorado. Lots of security. They can go there.”

  “Good. Get them moving, by car preferably. Airline tickets are too easy to follow-up on. Can you borrow a car from somebody?”

  Fleming knew not to waste time asking questions. They weren’t needed. The directions would come. “Sure. My next door neighbor.”

  “I want you to drive to the Chattanooga Airport. Park the car in the long-term lot, and walk across to the general aviation area. You’ll see a Cessna 172 parked on the ramp nearest the parking lot. A man will be standing by the plane wearing a red T-shirt with a Sloppy Joe’s Bar logo and a ball cap with the Tampa Bay Rays logo. His name is Tom Telson. He’ll fly you to the Charlie Brown Airport in Atlanta and put you in a hotel near the airport. He’ll use a credit card with the name of a company I own but nobody knows about. Don’t give out your real name. Don’t use your credit card. Don’t call anybody. Don’t tell even your family where you are. I’ll be in touch.”

  It was getting late, close to ten, but Doc had one more call to make. Detective J. D. Duncan.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  “Jock,” Doc said, “I owe you an apology.”

  “For what?” Jock asked.

  “I knew from the memos Matt was sending me that you were helping out with the investigation. I checked up on you, but could only find out that you worked for an oil company and had ties to some innocuous federal agency. I knew those are often covers for CIA operations. I was concerned that you might be one of those guys.”

  Jock grinned. “Now you have insulted me. Accusing me of being CIA.”

  “Yeah. J.D. straightened me out on the way over here.”

  “Apology accepted, Doc.”

  “I called J.D. late Saturday night,” Doc said. “Told her what I thought was going down, but that I needed her police credentials to check up on the other team members. I had always kept their names and addresses current in case anything like this popped up.” He looked at me. “I told her not to call you.”

  “Why, Doc?” I asked. “I thought we were in this together.”

  “I was afraid that somebody was tracking us pretty closely. I didn’t want to tip them off if you were somehow being watched. Besides, if they thought you were going about business as usual, they wouldn’t be too worried about what I was doing. And I didn’t want Jock to know.”

  “And what were you planning to do?” I asked.

  “Disappear. J.D. didn’t want to do anything without your okay. I didn’t tell her I didn’t trust Jock, but I finally convinced her that if she got in touch with you about any of this, it would put your life in danger.”

  J.D. said, “Matt, I was afraid that any direct contact with you after I left on Monday morning could lead somebody to us or put you in more danger. That’s why I used the rather cryptic messages on the e-mail.”

  “Doc,” I said, “I think your lawyer Anderson sent me an e-mail that led me to the ownership of this house.”

  “He did, at my request. If that e-mail had been intercepted, I don’t think anybody would have traced it to me or even thought it had anything to do with me.”

  “What makes you think somebody was tracking us?” I asked.

  “I got to thinking about the attempts on your life. Both came right after you’d made a connection to the Laotians. The first attempt happened the day after you initially met with Stanley in Macon, and the second the day after you connected the Asians to the Dulcimer and the murders of Katherine Brewster and the lawyer from Jacksonville.

  “I didn’t connect Brew’s daughter to the Dulcimer murders,” Doc continued, “until after I heard about Flem’s son. Then it hit me in the face. The connection between somebody trying to kill you and your discoveries about the Asians and the link to Soupy in Laos. Add to that the fact that the murder attempts didn’t seem too professional, and I thought they might be some sort of misdirection.”

  “They seemed real enough to me,” I said.

  “Think about it,” said Jock. “The first guy used a knife when he could have shot you. The beach was deserted, no one around. It never quite made sense to me that the guy didn’t use a gun. And that idiot Clyde Bates would be the last person a professional would hire to take you out.”

  J.D. chimed in. “If we’re dealing with the CIA and they thought you were chasing Laotians, it’d be in their interest to keep up the charade. The only thing tying the Longboat murders to Soupy was the fact that Asians were aboard Dulcimer at the time of the murders, and we thought there might be a connection to Soupy because of his fight with Jim Desmond. We didn’t know about the Thanatos connection.�
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  I nodded. “Okay. But what about Stanley?”

  “We got off on a tangent,” said J.D. “Stanley was dirty, but not because he was involved with the killings. He was just a dope pusher who’d had some connection to two of the victims. There are such things as coincidences, whether you believe in them or not.” She smiled.

  “Then why were you on their payroll?” I asked.

  “What? Whose payroll?”

  I laughed. “Okay. I know you’re not, but somebody went to a lot of trouble to convince us you were playing footsy with Stanley.” I told them the story of the bank accounts and what we’d found out.

  J.D. sat back in her chair, a look of consternation on her face. “Does Chief Lester think I’m taking bribes?”

  “He doesn’t know about the bank account,” I said.

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “No.”

  “Matt, he needs to know.”

  “Why? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “But suppose I had? Bill Lester is a good cop. He wouldn’t let this slide.”

  “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell him.”

  “Call him, Matt. Now. Bring him up to date.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him tonight.”

  She frowned. “Why in the world would someone go to all that trouble to implicate me?”

  “More misdirection,” said Logan. “It’d be no big deal for the CIA to tap into the computers at the Otto Foundation and their bank. They could have set up the whole thing so that it looked as if Nigella was receiving money into that account for months. Then, suddenly the money started going to the Sarasota bank and J.D. was withdrawing it. They just added J.D.’s Social Security number to the mix to make it seem more authentic.”

  I shook my head. “But that would presuppose they knew that we’d get into Stanley’s computers and follow up on the bank’s.”