There in the bar, in his full-bodied perverse glory was Thomas Alderson Ackert III. All. of him. He revolved ninety degrees on his stool and beamed that tidewater blue-blood smile that said, “Screw you, sucker, me and my career are going to make it to the top standing on the heads of patsies like you.”
He raised his glass and waved me over in grand style.
“Hey, Fraze-buddy, how you doin’? Join me for a drink?”
“Some other time, Ackert.”
“Now, now, Fraze. Ol’ Ackert came here special to see you. Nice place your Nip honey’s got herself. Right nice.” He gave the room a generous sweep with his arm.
“Look, Ackert, you’re a long way from Yokosuka or wherever you’re based, so shove off. They’re kind of fussy about the caliber of people they serve here.”
We were two kinds of naval officer, and they didn’t mix well.
“Well, then, you better just come on over here and listen careful.” The smile was gone. No use wearing it out.
“I’m out here doin’ a nice tour with the Defense Intelligence Agency. You remember them, they feed intelligence to the Company, analyst stuff. Well, the Company asked that I get in touch with you—seeing that we’re old war buddies and all. Seems they’re a tad upset about some cold-weather advertising you’ve been doin’. Get the picture?”
The picture unfolded like a recurring bad dream. A bad dream whose uncontrollable momentum brought unescapable horror.
My stomach felt as if it were falling from some great height. If he knew this early, who else might know? And how much?
“Don’t know what you and they are talking about. Better check to see they’re not overpaying their source.”
“You don’t?” Ackert said nonchalantly. “Well, if it’s a third-world operation, who cares? But if it’s a Warsaw Pact country, we say cool it.” He tugged a shirt cuff into proper alignment—appearances meant everything to Ackert.
“I can play hard or I can play easy. Now I always did say you were a smart boy, just prone to get hung up on things that’ll get you nowhere fast. But maybe you already know that. Hangups and all, your problem is you just don’t get with the program.”
The smile had returned.
“I can maybe fix it so you can’t go swimming or skiing for a couple months. Or better yet we…”
We again. How much did we know? Who else knew?
“…could get the government of Japan to throw you out of the country permanently. Now, that sure would be a shame. Keep you away from the slinky buddha-head dolly of yours. Course, I’d look after her for you, nice spirited piece of stuff like that. She might not take to me at first, but she’d come around. Hell, they always do. Just got to know how to show ’em who’s boss. Maybe dust some of that spirit off ’em.” He winked broadly.
My ears warmed and great ripples of anger distorted my vision. Sometimes reaching out and smashing something low and ugly is the best thing to do. Slam it, smash it, grind it under your foot. The trouble was, the habit of command had cursed me with a subdued, rational approach to confrontation. Restraint, I hoped, would protect the mission.
It didn’t. That was my second mistake.
My first had occurred many years ago in Vietnam…
CHAPTER 7
The procession of eight sampans snaked silently through the choked and twisted mangrove swamp, tracing the barely discernible bed of the core river. The air tasted of steam and smelled of wet, rotting vegetation. We were on a fool’s sojourn into a damp green labyrinth.
Each crew could just make out the sampan ahead of it, for little of the quarter moon penetrated the gloom of the triple-canopy foliage. Swathed in mosquito netting like unworldly beekeepers, it was hard to resist the tooth-gritting urge to swat the insects that choked the air around us.
I gave the signal for the lead sampan to put more distance between it and the main body. Smooth, orderly movement to the objective was imperative if we were to succeed.
Soon we would have to eliminate the series of sentries on the next quarter mile of riverbank between here and where the two American POWs were held.
The lead sampan surged ahead, nearly capsizing. Two of the boat’s Vietnamese scouts paddled steadying strokes, the third lay low in the waist section.
“Lai day.”
The lead boat was being challenged from somewhere up ahead. The procession, now bristling with flat-black steel, halted, and only the lead boat continued.
“Lai day, lai day.”
The command was casual, and though I could not see the sentry, I knew he was waving the sampan over to the bank. “Come over here,” the Viet Cong soldier had demanded.
Fortunately, the soldier did not expect any resistance, for his experience did not include the discipline of more conventional sentry duty. Like most VC sentries, he planned to assess a “tax” on anything of value in the sampan.
“Ratchet-chet, ratchet-chet, ratchet-chet.”
The muffled chatter from the nine-millimeter submachine gun carried faintly over the noises of the swamp. A short groan followed.
Offhandedly, the scout in the waist of the lead boat had fired a burst from a silenced Model 76 into the careless sentry as the sampan had touched the bank. The rounds, well grouped, penetrated cleanly, fatally.
The procession began anew, and as each boat drifted by him, the sentry bobbed and nodded in the tepid water. His gold-toothed smile whispered the forfeiture of failure.
On we paddled, with tensed, weary backs, gripping our paddles too tightly. Disturbed by the lead boat, a great white swamp bird fluttered, then screeched off into the darkness.
That previous afternoon, the jeep’s wheels slid well to the right in the axle-deep mud as I had turned to clear the MACV compound gate. As I slowed for a second, Ackert vaulted uninvited into the shotgun seat. I was on my way to the tactical operations center to clear an area of operation with the local Army people. We were Navy but they had overall supervisory authority for this AO.
“Whoo-eee, I think you’ve really gone off the deep end this time, Fraze.”
The air was heavy with humidity and my camouflage shirt stuck uncomfortably to the seat back.
“Glad I’m not part of this one. If the VC don’t ventilate your bod’, the regional general will fry it. Maybe leave it out in the hot sun ’til it gets nice and crispy-like,” he said, nudging me in the ribs with more force than necessary.
Thomas Alderson Ackert III, a big blond-headed charmer and natural athlete, had graduated from the Academy, a first-class ticket puncher and had ever since been collecting career-enhancing billets. With Ackert’s tight, winning, and even-toothed smile it was inevitable people were more impressed than they ought to have been. As a onetime starting lineman for the Academy, he found the rigors of basic training for the Navy’s elite Sea/Air/Land (SEAL) Teams trying and occasionally an inconvenience. But the prestige that accompanied the role of frogman-commando would surely ease along his career. Shrewd and capable, he got his ticket punched at all the right stops. What he did at each stop didn’t matter as long as he didn’t make waves.
Someone had once described him as that thoroughly treacherous golden bastard who knew all the rules of the game, had mastered them with great fanfare, but hadn’t the remotest idea why the game was played in the first place. He was fond of all the current buzz words like “systems supportive” and “middle-tier management,” which he sprinkled generously into a honeyed “good ol’ boy” pap. First to “get on board” questionable programs of high origin, he sported an array of staff awards, which he had cleverly harvested as a “bombproof” in rear areas. Each of these attributes viewed individually might seem fairly harmless, but examined in concert they were the unmistakable symptoms of a deep and dangerous pathology. And he himself was a symptom of a still greater pathology.
It began to rain in warm, heavy sheets. Ackert smiled to himself with the satisfaction drawn from the prospect of someone else’s risk taking and probable doom. I kept my eyes straight ahea
d.
Maximum glory and minimum inconvenience were the goals that guided his every action. It was evident in the way he led a platoon. It had been evident to some from the very beginning of training.
The high-water mark of our basic training had been Hell Week. The week was an endless marathon of exhausting physical competition under stress between boat crews for twenty-one hours each day. Between fifty and seventy percent of a training class melted away during that one week. Sleep became an obsessively precious commodity and during slack periods a few men always managed to crawl away to hide and sneak a mind-preserving nap. Everyone did it at some point, though naps were risky. Some fell into deep sleep and could not be awakened until their bodies had restored themselves. By that time they had been dropped from training.
In Ackert’s boat crew there had been a petty officer who had become known as “the Rock.” Unshakable, he virtually carried his crew through every event. His endurance was phenomenal. The force of his character pulled weaker men along in his slipstream, and only in the last days did he begin to fade. His self-sacrifice had strained even his strength to its limits. A benign Sisyphus, he only rolled his boulder faster.
During one interval he, too, crawled behind a sand dune—after he had been sure to tell Ackert where to find him. Not long afterward, an instructor called for an immediate muster. Ackert could have saved the Rock, but only by drawing additional harassment upon himself. He didn’t. There was only room for one star in Ackert’s boat crew.
Things seemed to happen to people around Ackert, and oddly the outcome always seemed to make Ackert look better. The men called him “the Golden One,” and it was not meant as a compliment. More than once his rushes to “get on board” had placed them in jeopardy.
“You haven’t cleared this with the regional general, have you? You’re not bein’ smart, Fraze-buddy. Fella’s gotta look out for himself. Hell, you’d never catch Ol’ Ackert trying a fool stunt like that.”
“Sure, I haven’t cleared it. You know why? The red tape has been made thick; too thick and stretched to protect too many people. Takes too damn long. That’s why no one’s been able to pull a successful POW op yet. Those guys would rot before we could save them.” The hard edge of frustration slipped into my voice.
Clearing a POW rescue operation through the IV Corps military region’s commanding general took days. Intelligence on the location of POWs in the Mekong Delta was only good for hours. The Viet Cong kept POWs in ones and twos moving from camp to camp. In the delta there was no central POW stronghold like the Hanoi Hilton much farther north. And the triple-canopy jungle hid all.
I swerved to avoid a Viet family on its way to the river market in the downpour. It wasn’t their fault Ackert was in my jeep.
“Ackert, why don’t you fly to Saigon and kiss up to someone career enhancing? Seems a nice fellow like you ought to be sipping highballs with some NAVFORV armchair raiders at the Continental.”
He drummed his fingers contentedly on the dash.
“Yeah. Sure, sport, maybe I ought to. Leave the olive-drab-and-camouflage crusades to you. Wouldn’t want to hazard this beautifully bronzed body on any of the famous Quillon Frazer missions. You’ve done too well for too long. Anyway, too many ladies would never forgive me. You know how it is.”
He paused.
“So you’re going to just trip over those POWs accidental like? Cute, real cute,” he added.
Under the circumstances, Saigon would indeed be a safe, comfortable place to be. A blown rescue operation would be bad press, and the whiz-kid managerial types who gave the regional general his orders didn’t want any bad press. Bad press tarnished their shiny, newly minted images.
On the other hand, a Viet Cong POW camp was an unsafe, uncomfortable place to be. A camp dictated death by millimeters, from disease or malnutrition. A month after capture, a prisoner became a mosquito bite-blotched skeleton in Viet Cong boxer shorts with barely the strength to swallow.
From out of nowhere a Honda 50 carrying a man and three children passed the right side of the jeep.
Ackert scratched his golden head and yawned. “So you’re going to gamble everything on the story of some greasy, bucktoothed gook defector. I always did figure you for a gook lover. Too bad, thought you knew better than to trust those apes.”
This was meant to rankle. It was well known in the detachment that the word gook was forbidden in my platoon. How could you attempt to conduct a counter-guerrilla war in a country and at the same time degrade the most essential element to your success with the term gooks?
“They don’t speak English, drink much beer, or play football, so what good are they? Well…I’d trust him farther than any tidewater ticket puncher with big ambitions. And less integrity than our platoon’s pet boa constrictor.”
“Now talk nice to ol’ Ackert, hear?” He whispered venomously. “Kind of touchy, aren’t we? Wait ’til old IV Corps hands you your head once he’s found out you led a deliberate rescue mission without letting him give the whiz kids a chance to take first bows.”
“And who’s going to tell him?”
“I don’t know…,” he said with his best year-book smile. “Maybe me.”
The jeep stopped with a jerk.
It would be a good fight: in this corner, the rawboned Quillon Frazer in the celebrated and foredoomed tradition of his Highland ancestors…and in the opposite corner, Thomas Alderson Ackert III, golden-haired tidewater Goliath, destined to insinuate himself to the mastheads of naval power.
But I had more important matters to concern me. In particular, two captive Americans dying slow deaths in forgotten places.
Ackert would have to wait.
The sampans glided forward beneath the interlocking talons of the unending mangroves. As if anticipating our intrusion, the jungle growth became more lush and more concealing.
With increased confidence the crew of the lead sampan took out the next sentry as quietly as it had the first.
My radioman, Puckins, looking like Huck Finn gone to war, turned in the bow of our sampan and gave me the three-ring okay signal for no particular reason. Puckins was just the SEAL you’d want in the bow on a cold-sweat jaunt like this one. Some men transmit waves of calm and well-being, like brandy on a cold night. It was like him to diffuse the aching tension with some insane pantomime.
He pointed to the sampan behind ours and made gestures indicating a “thick neck” until a strand of red hair fell out from under his hat. I knew he could only mean burly Wickersham. Then, with three quick gestures of a skilled mime, he conveyed that Wickersham’s Cholon girlfriend was generous with her favors. Heck of a statement for a circuit rider’s grandson to make—in the manner he made it.
I looked behind to Wickersham and then realized he couldn’t see any of this. I thanked the god of darkness for this one small favor. We didn’t need anyone riling up Wickersham. Fortunately, he was probably preoccupied with computing the fair market value of eight used, slightly bullet-ridden sampans. Yesterday I’d caught him trying to sell a bale of phony VC flags to a couple of PBR crews.
Along the banks the trees grew in ever more frantic postures as if trying to escape the parasite plants choking them.
We now approached the satellite camp and the final sentry. The river was not very deep here—often I’d feel my paddle brush bottom mud. Yet the water was still black and opaque like the blood of a night wound.
From our defector, or hoi chanh, we had learned that the satellite camp was one of several small outpost camps that surrounded the center encampment of a battalion or greater of Viet Cong. Nestled in triple-canopy swamp, the satellite camp was secure from air strikes and acted as part of the buffer against major U.S. or ARVN troop movements.
It was composed of eight huts in two parallel rows of four perpendicular to the river, which at that point was fifteen feet across. A drainage ditch ran between the two rows and intersected the river at a right angle. On either side of the ditch were wooden plank-ways connecting the h
uts.
The hoi chanh had indicated that the two American captives would be in one of three places: in the two huts farthest from the river, in the tiger cages outside the huts, or shackled to nearby trees outside those huts—if they were still alive.
It was all very simple, except for the three or four Viet Cong that occupied each of the eight huts, the two hundred or so more Viet Cong and NVA nearby at the main encampment, and the last sentry stationed just yards downstream from the satellite camp.
A small shelter loomed out of the darkness abreast of the sampan just ahead of us. This was the post of the last sentry. Its small roof had offered relief from the monsoon rains. We turned our boat into the riverbank and stepped gingerly into the mud. All the sampans were unloading now. Everyone was wobbling around on tension-weakened legs.
The elimination of the last sentry had been the smoothest, and the reason was clear. His body sprawled in relaxed lines on a plastic ground sheet; he had been asleep on watch. Now his dreams would no longer be rudely interrupted.
My hand signal brought the men silently to their positions. I counted eighteen sweat-glistening, green-painted faces. An M-60 machine gunner stood on either outboard side of the camp. Then the two grenadiers mounted the two inboard plank ways carrying haversacks stuffed with concussion grenades. Two men stayed with our sampans, watching for signs of the main force upstream and uneasily counting the beached sampans that weren’t ours. The rest of the platoon split into two files, one for each plank way. Puckins and I stood in the ditch between the plank ways.
Before I could give any commands, an excited Vietnamese voice, one of theirs, broke the silence. The subsequent burst of AK-47 fire made any prompting of the grenadiers to begin their long sprint down the plank ways entirely unnecessary. They tossed two concussion grenades into each hut, slowing only as they approached the last pair of shelters.
“They’re here, here outside the end hooches. Corpsman! Mister Frazer!” one grenadier with a beard bellowed as they both attacked the last two huts, which had begun to return fire.
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