Lincoln had learned, as the years passed, that the business was a bit more complicated than that. In that first conversation, Sammy hadn’t said anything about taking a competitor who’d dared to tread on Black Mob turf into a neighborhood slaughterhouse and feeding him through the meat grinder. Then again, those parents describing the wonders of human reproduction never went into detail about the nuts and bolts of it, either.
When the evening ended, Sammy and Ellis dropped him off at his barracks. Special Warfare School would begin the next day. He would take abbreviated classes in unconventional warfare, psychological warfare, and counterinsurgency—classes designed to make him the kind of soldier the Army needed in the decidedly unconventional landscape of the Vietnam conflict.
But that night, he hugged the only father and brother he had ever known. Both squeezed him tight, and Lincoln saw a tear in Sammy’s eye when he said, “You take care over there, Lincoln. Like I told you from the start, we need you back home. If wearing that Green Beret means you make a little more money and get back sooner, that’s okay, but I don’t want you taking any foolish chances. I hate having you over there in the first place.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Lincoln said with a chuckle. “I’ll get home just as soon as I can.”
“In one piece, I hope,” Ellis added quietly when he embraced his brother. “I’m not worried about you, but he frets like an old lady.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” Lincoln muttered. “He’ll whup you just to prove you wrong.”
Ellis and Lincoln had laughed at that, and then Sammy and Ellis were gone and Lincoln turned to walk into a barracks full of men he’d never seen before and who might well resent the fact that he was there for a few months instead of a full year.
4
* * *
Because he was traveling solo instead of with his unit, he flew back to Vietnam on a commercial flight, aboard a Pan Am jet that landed at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport on a hot evening with a steady rain. He crossed the tarmac with his gear in his arms, feeling the rain splash against his face and breathing in the unique blend of jet fuel, garbage, and night-blooming flowers that would always say Vietnam to him.
He had left Vietnam as Private Clay, but when he returned, he was Corporal Lincoln Clay, assigned to Detachment A-101, C Company, 5th Special Forces Group. Instead of returning to his unit, he was sent to a Special Forces Operating Base—an SFOB—near the 17th Parallel, which was the line that had been drawn to divide North and South Vietnam. The Special Forces troops at the SFOB were an A Team—officially advisers, not combatants, under the command of a B Team headquarters situated in Danang. He hitched a ride there on a helicopter carrying two government bureaucrats from Washington who, Lincoln guessed from their manner, had enjoyed their few days in Saigon a bit too heartily, and a reporter from the New York Times who ignored Lincoln in favor of badgering the hungover guys in suits.
Three days after landing in Saigon, he was on the ground at the Lang Vei Special Forces Camp in Quang Tri Province, seven kilometers down Route 9 from where the Marines were busy building a major base at Khe Sanh. The terrain was mountainous, and the blades of the helicopter that had brought him there whipped dense fog into a funnel as it ascended again.
The camp was a chaotic-seeming assemblage of thatched huts and concrete bunkers. The dominant feature was a two-story concrete tower that Lincoln would learn was the TOC, the Tactical Operations Center.
Lincoln stood there as a second lieutenant greeted the bureaucrats and led them toward the TOC. A sergeant did the same with the reporter. Finally, after several minutes alone, a corporal emerged from the fog.
“You lost?”
“I’m Corporal Clay.” He patted the pocket containing his orders, as if that would mean anything to the other soldier. “I’ve been assigned here.”
The corporal eyed him. He was a white guy who hadn’t shaved in a week or so and maybe hadn’t bathed, either. His shirt hung open, and a scar that Lincoln thought looked as though it had been made by a knife puckered the flesh of his sternum. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “You can still run, and I’ll pretend I didn’t see you.”
“Run where? All the way back to Saigon?”
“All the way back to Fort Bragg, if you know what’s good for you. Lang Vei is the shithole of Vietnam.” The corporal pointed north, then west. “Go any farther north and you’re in North Vietnam. Laos is just two clicks over there. It’s been pretty quiet lately, but that could change any time.”
“I guess I’m here to stay,” Lincoln said.
The other man shrugged. “I’ll show you the team house. Captain’s in the TOC, but he’s got guests so you can meet him later.”
“I flew in with them. They were looking pretty green.”
“Saigon will do that to you. Lincoln, huh?”
“That’s right. Lincoln, like the president.”
“I’m Stephens,” the man said. “Duncan, like the yo-yo.”
On the way to the team house, they passed more indigenous faces than American ones. Stephens explained that there were only twenty-four Special Forces soldiers at the camp, but the force included a whole company of Montagnard tribesmen and three South Vietnamese rifle companies.
“Twenty-three now, actually,” Stephens corrected himself. “Well, you make twenty-four, I guess. You’re replacing DuPage.”
“What happened to him?”
“He threw a grenade.”
The answer confused Lincoln. “He threw it?”
“It hit a tree and bounced back. Everybody scrambled, but he was too slow. Surprised that it came back at him, I think. Anyway, he was still standing there when it went off.”
“That’s some shitty luck,” Lincoln said.
“Bad luck for him, bad luck for you.”
“Me?”
Stephens shrugged again. “Everybody liked DuPage. You live long enough, maybe they’ll like you, too.”
“Or maybe not?”
“Chance you take,” Stephens said. “Sure you don’t want to run?”
“I’ll stay,” Lincoln replied. “I’ll take that chance.”
• • •
There were a half dozen guys in the team house. A couple were smoking on their bunks, one reading a paperback book. Three others played cards around a table laden with ashtrays and soda cans and a few beer bottles. One sat on his bunk in his underwear, strumming an acoustic guitar and mumbling the words to some song Lincoln didn’t know.
Lincoln suppressed a smile when he saw the table. Where there were booze, smokes, and gambling, there was money to be made. He would just have to figure out what the supply lines were and take them over for himself.
Everybody except the guitarist looked up when Lincoln trailed Stephens inside. Stephens pointed to an empty bunk, and Lincoln dropped his duffel onto it.
“That’s DuPage’s bunk,” the guitarist said. He hadn’t raised his eyes.
“I guess it’s mine now,” Lincoln said.
The guitarist shook his head slowly. “No respect for the dead.”
“What do you want me to do, sleep on the floor?”
“Or outside. It don’t make any difference to me.”
“I’m pretty sure DuPage won’t care.”
“You didn’t know him,” the soldier with the book said. He set it down on the bunk, pages down, spine up. “He was from Alabama. He didn’t much care for colored folks. Having one sleeping in his bunk—he might just come back to haunt you.”
“I’m not too worried about ghosts,” Lincoln said.
“This here’s Lincoln Clay,” Stephens said. “Lincoln, like the president.”
The guy with the book barked a laugh. “Anybody DuPage hated worse than colored people, it was Lincoln.”
“He sounds like a charming dude,” Lincoln said. “Too bad he’s gone; we’d probably be best friends.”
The men all laughed at that, except the guitarist, who picked a mournful-sounding dirge.
�
� • •
Captain Prato appeared not to have an ounce of fat on him. His skin was tanned and tight and seemed to cling directly to his musculature. The other soldiers Lincoln had met here were casual about their uniforms and their hair—it was hard to be otherwise when both were constantly coated with dust that thickened into mud when the men sweated in the oppressive heat between their too-irregular field showers—but Prato was crisp and military to the core and somehow clean and shaved. Ushered into his presence, after the civilians from D.C. had been picked up by some marines from Khe Sanh, Lincoln whipped off his beret, snapped off a salute, and stood at attention while Prato studied him. After several long seconds, the captain said, “At ease, soldier.”
Lincoln spread his legs and clasped his hands behind his back, still clutching the beret.
“Welcome to Lang Vei, Corporal,” Prato said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“I read your file. I gather you’re . . . new . . . to Special Forces.”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Abbreviated course, it said.”
“Yessir.”
“You know which end of a gun to point at the enemy?”
“Yessir.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“I won’t let you down, sir.”
“You’d better not. There aren’t enough of us here for anyone to not pull his own weight. The Montagnards are brave, and they hate the communists. The South Vietnamese regulars, I’m not always so sure about. Sometimes I think they’d sell us out for a few bucks and a bottle of wine. Other times I think it’d only take the wine. But it’s their war, so we’ve got to let them stay and fight it.”
“I understand, sir,” Lincoln said.
“Do you speak Vietnamese?”
“No, sir. I mean, just a few words.”
“What can you do?”
Lincoln considered for a moment. “Well, sir, I guess not much. All I know for sure is I’m pretty good at killin’ people.”
Prato cracked a smile, which looked like it hurt. He took it back in a hurry. “Well, that’s a start, I guess,” he said. “You’re dismissed, soldier.”
5
* * *
Ellis parked Lincoln’s Samson Drifter a few blocks away from Heritage Square. The LaValle Street sidewalks were busy with people headed toward the rally, though whether to participate or just to gawk, Ellis couldn’t tell. Maybe, like him, they were going there hoping to score, one way or another.
Oh, the ones with signs were easy enough to figure. “Equal Rights for All,” “End Segregation,” “I Am a Man.” Even a few “Make Love, Not War” placards scattered about. And more humorous ones like “This Is a Sign”—that one was carried by a long-haired white kid, probably from one of the local colleges. Ellis wasn’t surprised to see white college students in the crowd streaming toward the park—what better way to rebel against society than to support the burgeoning civil rights movement? He was surprised by the number of older white people he saw, many of them pulling along elementary school–aged children. Somehow, he didn’t think they were gawkers, or counter-protesters, but they looked more like Southern Union supporters than Freedom Marchers. Still, Ellis wasn’t one to judge a book by the color of its cover. Maybe because he was sick and tired of being judged all the time himself.
That was part of the reason he was here today. These rallies were a good place to pick up chicks, and after all the ribbing Lincoln and Sammy had given him up north about not having a girlfriend, he felt the need to prove to himself—and everyone else—that Casanova Clay was not the only smooth operator in the family.
Getting laid was easy for the son of a mob boss. At the rally, though, the girls wouldn’t be in the life, so getting in one’s pants would require a bit more finesse. He was sure he had the goods, but it didn’t hurt to exercise them once in a while.
He took a deep breath, checked his hair in the rearview one last time, and climbed from the car. He blended seamlessly into the sidewalk traffic, sizing up the women around him as he did. Most of them were not what he’d call prime pickings—chubby girls in tight bell-bottoms and multicolored striped shirts that accentuated their curves in all the wrong ways, thin girls in short shorts all but swallowed by long cotton tunics. Too short, too tall. That one was pretty until she opened her mouth—practically all gums—to bray out a laugh like a horse that smoked a pack a day.
Part of him wondered if this was why he didn’t have a girlfriend—because he was too damned picky. Another part wondered if it was just one more way of keeping them all at a distance. If none of the women he met were ever good enough, then no one could blame him for not being in a relationship, could they? And if he was never in a relationship, he didn’t have to worry about screwing it up. You couldn’t fail at something you never tried.
Then again, maybe fail was all you could hope to do in that case.
He shook his head. This much introspection couldn’t be good for him. He doubted he’d find a beer at the park, but maybe he’d get lucky and find someone dealing. Nothing hard—Sammy would freak—but a little weed couldn’t hurt. Might make finding a girl easier, too. Being high tended to lower his standards.
He saw a group sporting tie-dyed shirts and flowers in their hair and made a beeline for them. Today was his lucky day; peaceniks and pot went hand-in-hand.
But he’d wormed his way only about halfway through the crowd toward them when a gap opened up ahead of him and he saw her.
God, but she was beautiful.
Hair worn in a curly Afro that framed her face like a midnight halo, heavily lashed eyes that a man could drown in, lips so full and lush he felt an instant reaction below his belt. And then his gaze traveled downward.
She had a rack a Playboy Bunny would envy, even buttoned up behind the prim-and-proper dress she wore. But not too prim—the light blue muslin hugged her hips like a lover’s caress, then fell, cascading, just below her knees. The sight of her bare calves, shining like polished ebony in the sunlight, made Ellis’s mouth go dry.
His feet adjusted course, heading straight for her, peaceniks and their probable weed forgotten.
She caught sight of him when he was a few feet away and watched him approach curiously.
“Do I know you?” she finally asked, after he’d stopped and stood there speechless for several agonizingly long moments.
Ellis shook his head.
No, but you want to, he thought, knowing it was the kind of line he would usually use. Also knowing there was no way he could pull it off now, not with this one; he’d sound like an arrogant ass at best, a second-rate pickup artist at worst.
Instead, he thought the sincere, humble approach would be his likeliest play. “No, I don’t think we’ve met before. But you seem to know what’s going on here, and I was hoping you could explain it to me.”
He had no idea where that had come from, but he’d take it. Especially since it elicited a friendly smile and an outstretched hand.
“Well, you’ve come to the right place. I’m Vanessa Dautrieve, with CORE, and I helped organize this rally.”
“I’m Ellis Robinson. What’s CORE?”
“The Congress of Racial Equality. We seek to bring about equality for all people, regardless of race, creed, sex, ethnic background, what have you. Our methods are nonviolent, patterned after Gandhi’s. We believe civil disobedience can effect real change. That’s why we’re here today. To show them we’re not going anywhere, no matter what they do to us. We won’t give up until we get what’s rightfully ours.”
All Ellis really knew about Gandhi was that he’d gone on a hunger strike in India. He wasn’t even really sure why, or if it had been successful—though he supposed if civil rights groups in America were using the man’s tactics, it must have been.
He had his doubts about the nonviolence part, though. Bullies were rampant in his world, and turning the other cheek meant only that you’d get hit harder the second time than you had the first.
&nb
sp; Still, he didn’t think admitting his ignorance—or his doubts—to Vanessa was going to win him any points, so he just nodded in what he hoped was a sage fashion. Then he remembered something.
“Weren’t you guys part of the Dryades Street boycott? ‘Don’t buy where you can’t work’ and all that?” Dryades Street was where all the black people bought their clothes—up until 1960, that is. Then some civil rights groups—including CORE, if Ellis was recalling correctly—organized a boycott of the white-owned and -operated merchants who sold to blacks but refused to hire them. Faced with economic disaster, some of the stores had started hiring blacks—but just as many had picked up and moved away, and boarded-up storefronts had become a common sight. Ellis wasn’t so sure the boycott hadn’t done more harm than good. “And the Freedom Rides?”
Vanessa nodded. “CORE was; I wasn’t. I didn’t become involved with the group until more recently.” She looked away then, as if she were embarrassed or ashamed. Ellis understood the look—he’d worn it often enough himself. It was the same expression he had when trying to explain why he couldn’t do something his friends wanted him to do, because either Sammy or Lincoln would frown on it.
“Your parents aren’t big supporters of the cause, I take it?”
Vanessa’s gaze rose to meet his, startled and grateful. She nodded again, this time with a small, rueful smile.
“You can say that again.”
Just then, another woman came up to them, and Vanessa introduced her as Oretha Castile, former president of the local CORE chapter.
“Oretha can tell you far more about the movement than I can; she’s been active here with various organizations in New Bordeaux off and on since—”
“—Boundary Street!” Ellis interrupted, sticking out his hand to shake hers.
Oretha smiled.
“Yes, that was me.”
Oretha and three other students had been arrested for staging a sit-in at the lunch counter at McCrory’s on Boundary Street—the whites-only counter. It had made the papers, and their case wound up going all the way to the Supreme Court, where they actually won. Maybe there was something to this civil disobedience stuff after all.
Mafia III Page 3
