The crowd was keyed up, yelling encouragement and waiting for the first blow.
McMurray tried to close, but Torrance used his reach and speed to stay just out of range, teasing the shorter man with jabs that dotted the boxer’s face with red welts. Frustrated, McMurray charged. The black belt sidestepped and swept the boxer’s feet from under him. McMurray instinctively reached out for support as he went down, leaving his head unprotected. Torrance set himself and delivered a roundhouse kick to McMurray’s face. The snapping kick opened a cut on the boxer’s cheek. The crowd roared, excited by the blood. McMurray hit the sand and rolled, frantic to get away. Torrance seemed in no hurry. The boxer scrambled to his feet.
“What do you think?” Wingate asked without moving his eyes from the fighters.
“The kick was well executed,” Carl answered quietly. He was concentrating on the men with an expert eye.
Torrance landed a few more jabs and got cocky. He started to taunt his opponent, but the boxer fought for a living and he did not anger easily. He was also in good shape and showed no sign that the punishment he’d taken had weakened him.
Torrance jabbed again, and the boxer slipped the punch, shuffled forward, and drove a hard right hand to the black belt’s ribs. Torrance flinched, and McMurray followed with a quick left that grazed Torrance’s neck. Torrance clinched, encircling the boxer’s powerful shoulders with his long arms. McMurray brought his knee up toward Torrance’s groin. As soon as the knee rose Torrance shifted his weight. The judo throw was executed perfectly, and McMurray was flat on his back before he knew what happened. Torrance speared a hand into McMurray’s groin, rendering the boxer helpless. Rodino came back into the arena and raised the winner’s hand. Torrance danced around the ring, arms raised in triumph, while McMurray writhed on the ground.
Wingate stood up. “Let’s get some air before the next fight.”
Carl followed the General to the door at the back of the barn. When they passed Wingate’s driver, the General told him to place a bet on the next fight.
A crowd had gathered just outside the door, and the General led Carl to a stand of trees. The night air was refreshing after the smoke-filled barn.
“What was your opinion of the fight?” Wingate asked.
“Torrance is good, but that boxer was made for him. He was too slow, too stationary, and he wasn’t used to fighting someone who wrestles and kicks.”
“How do you think you would do against Torrance?”
There was something about Wingate’s tone that made Carl pause before answering. “What do you mean?”
“If you had to fight him, say tonight. How do you think you’d do?”
“You want me to fight him?” Carl asked.
“I think it would be an interesting match.”
“Tonight?” Carl asked, searching Wingate’s face in an attempt to understand what was behind the General’s questions, but Wingate’s chiseled features were in shadow.
“Not tonight,” he answered with a laugh just as his driver walked up and told them that the next fight was going to start.
“This should be a good bout,” Wingate said. He turned his back on his guest and headed for the barn. Carl was in turmoil. What had Wingate been after? Carl frequently felt that Wingate wanted something from him, but he had no idea what it was.
Carl had trouble concentrating during the rest of the bouts. Did the General really want him to fight Torrance, or was Wingate just curious about Carl’s opinion? During a break in the action, Carl wandered off by himself. He glanced across to the bar where a man was paying off the winners and Wingate was talking to Rodino in a dark corner.
The General was so powerful, so self-confident. What he wouldn’t give to have a father like that-a friend, but more than a friend. The General knew so much about so many things. Carl loved his mother. She worked so hard for him. But he yearned for something more. He missed having a father, a man who could advise him and guide him.
Carl knew that Vanessa believed the worst of her father, but Carl was certain that she was wrong. In the time he’d known him, Morris Wingate had never had a bad word for Vanessa. Carl was certain that he loved her and forgave her for the terrible opinion she had of him. Carl thought that the General was trying very hard to be a good father despite Vanessa’s efforts to alienate him. But he knew he couldn’t talk to her about his feelings; honesty in this matter would destroy his relationship with Vanessa, and the General’s daughter was the most important person in Carl’s world. But he wished that there could be a truce between Vanessa and her father.
Even more, he wished that Morris Wingate would begin to think of him not only as Vanessa’s boyfriend but also as a son.
4
Two days after his outing with the General, Carl paid for a month of lessons at Mark Torrance’s dojo. Torrance ran the dojo for a national franchise called International Karate, which had headquarters in Chicago. The school was located in a ghetto on the second floor of an old wood frame building. Most of the students were black or Chicano. A few whites traveled to the school because of Torrance’s reputation. Carl registered under a false name and pretended to be a beginner with some prior training. He took every opportunity to study Torrance’s technique. He concluded that Torrance was a good fighter with weaknesses that were apparent only to someone with Carl’s abilities.
Torrance’s last class ended at ten every weekday. Occasionally, the sensei would go out for beers with some of his students; but he never went out on Wednesday night, because that was when he did the books. This Wednesday evening, Carl was dressed in black, which helped him blend into the shadows in the alley across from the dojo. Twenty minutes after the last student descended the wooden steps from the second floor landing Carl pulled on a ski mask and raced across the street and up the stairs. His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding when he reached the landing. He knew how insane he was to come here. He was a boy and Torrance was a seasoned fighter. There was still time to stop. He wasn’t even certain that Morris Wingate wanted him to fight Torrance. The General hadn’t brought up the subject again. But what if this was a test; what if the General wanted to see what Carl was made of? Fear churned in him and he almost turned away, but something stronger-his desire to please General Wingate-forced his hand to grasp the doorknob and push the door inward.
The dojo was a large room with hardwood floors. There were warm-up mats in one corner, and punching bags of various sizes hung from the ceiling along the near wall. Across the dojo, next to the locker room, was a wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. The small office where Torrance was working was on the far side of the room across from the front door. The dojo was dark, but there was a light in the office. Carl could see Torrance seated at his desk.
Carl crossed to the other side of the dojo quietly, hugging the wall and staying in the shadows. When he was in position he could see Torrance entering the amounts from a stack of checks into a ledger. Seated at the desk, concentrating on his books, Torrance presented an easy target. Carl remembered what the General had said about surprise being admirable in a fight and fighting fair being something one did only on TV, but he wanted a true test of his abilities.
Carl was no stranger to combat, but his fights had always been with boys like Sandy Rhodes and Mike Manchester, who had no training. Torrance would not quit and he was used to fighting through pain. Carl wondered if he was making a mistake. Was he overmatched? There was only one way to find out.
Carl spotted a rack of dumbbells near the mirrored wall. He decided to draw Torrance into the open space in the dojo. He took a heavy weight from the top of the rack and dropped it. The metal hit the hardwood floor with a loud clanging sound that was amplified by the silence. Torrance leaped to his feet and stared into the darkness.
“Who’s there?”
The black belt walked to his office door and looked around the dojo. Carl backed into the shadows. When Torrance walked into the gym, Carl would confront him. But Torrance did not leave his office. He walk
ed to his desk and bent down. When the black belt turned around he was holding a handgun.
It was suddenly crystal-clear to Carl that he was no modern-day samurai on a mission for his master. He was a fool on a fool’s errand, a teenage boy who was living out a fantasy. General Wingate was not proposing a test when he asked Carl how he thought he would do in a fight with Torrance; he was making conversation. Unfortunately, Carl’s epiphany might have come too late. If Torrance caught him skulking in his dojo dressed like a ninja he would call the police, and Carl would be expelled from St. Martin’s. Carl realized that he had one chance to get out of the ridiculous situation he had made for himself.
As Torrance waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark, Carl slipped into the locker room. Torrance flipped on the lights in the dojo a second after the locker room door had swung shut. Carl nudged the door open and watched Torrance walk over to the rack that held the weights. The sensei knelt down and examined the dumbbell that Carl had dropped. Then he looked at the rack. He picked up the weight and placed it where it had been before. Carl heard the sound of metal on metal as Torrance tested the dumbbell’s stability to see if it could have fallen unaided. As soon as he concluded that it could not, Torrance moved to the center of the dojo and surveyed the gym, pointing his weapon as he turned. His eyes passed over the locker room door, then swung back to it. The black belt hesitated for a second, then headed for the lockers.
The locker room was long and narrow. Lockers lined the four walls and a row of lockers divided the room. At the end farthest from the door were showers in an open tiled area. The room offered few places to hide. Carl could dodge around the lockers, but how long could he keep that up? There was a section of the shower room that provided concealment from anyone standing near the lockers, but if Torrance looked into the shower area, he would be able to see Carl. If there was any distance between them, Carl would not stand a chance against a gun.
Suddenly the locker room lights went on. Carl had only seconds to act. The door to the locker room swung open and Torrance walked in. He paused by the door. From the end of the row of lockers in the middle of the room he could see all of the locker room except the shower area.
“Come out now and no one will get hurt. I’ve got a gun and I’ll use it.”
Torrance sounded unworried. Carl had to fight to keep calm.
“I’ll give you a three count. If you’re not out I’m going to shoot to kill.”
Carl considered surrendering. Maybe he could convince Torrance that he’d come in for extra practice. Then he remembered that he was hiding, dressed in black and wearing a ski mask, and he hadn’t gone to the office to ask Torrance for permission to work out. Torrance would turn him over to the police, or else just shoot him. The police would discover that he’d registered at the dojo under a phony name. He’d be expelled from school. It would kill his mother.
Torrance counted to three. He sighed. “Okay, pal. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The karate instructor moved down the row of lockers toward the showers. It was the only part of the locker room he could not see completely. He was three-quarters of the way down the row when Carl dropped on him from the narrow space between the ceiling and the top of the lockers that ran down the center of the room. Torrance stumbled forward and dropped the gun. The space between the lockers was too narrow for Torrance to turn. Carl hit the karate instructor from behind, bringing him to his knees, and applied a choke hold. Torrance was groping for the gun when he blacked out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Talking about his battle with Mark Torrance had worn Carl out. He reached for the glass of water on his bed stand and took a sip.
“Did you tell General Wingate what you’d done?” Ami asked.
“Not directly. There was a story in the newspaper, a novelty item about a black belt being beaten up. I cut it out and mailed it to him anonymously.”
“What happened after you mailed the clipping?”
Carl’s lips twisted into a cynical smile. “The General never mentioned the news story, but he must have received it, because I was drafted a few weeks later.”
“And you think Wingate was responsible for your draft notice?”
“I didn’t at first. I even went to him for help. I had a scholarship to Dartmouth by then, a full ride. The General was the only person I could think of to ask for help. It took a while to get through to him. I kept calling and calling, but he didn’t get back to me for weeks. I’d almost given up when he phoned to say that he’d be in California for the weekend. I went out to the estate. I had all my hopes riding on our meeting.”
“What did he say?”
Carl looked as if the memory of the meeting had exhausted him. He shut his eyes when he spoke.
“Wingate was very blunt. He told me that he couldn’t help me avoid the draft. He thought that I should go. He reminded me that we were in a fight to the death against Communism. He asked me how I could justify going to fraternity parties and football games while boys my age were giving their lives for their country. He said that I’d make an excellent soldier and I could always go to school when my tour was up.”
“How did you feel about his advice?”
“I was very confused, but Wingate…the way he put it, he was so positive and he made it sound cowardly to try and get out of my duty to my country.”
“Did you fight to stay out of the army?”
“No. In the end I just gave in. The General convinced me that it was my duty and that I would regret shirking it for my whole life. He talked so glowingly about the army and what I could accomplish. He asked me if I hadn’t had enough of school, if I wasn’t ready to test myself in the real world.”
Carl rubbed his eyes. “The thing I regret most was what going in did to my mother. She had sacrificed so much for my future; my going to an Ivy League school was her dream come true. When I turned down the scholarship she aged overnight.” Carl’s voice became hoarse, and he could not go on for a moment. “She died while I was on a mission, thousands of miles away. I never knew if she forgave me.”
“What did Vanessa say when you told her that you were going into the army?” Ami asked softly.
“She went ballistic. She was convinced that Wingate had engineered my draft notice to break us up. When I decided to go in, she stopped talking to me. She wouldn’t take my calls, and she avoided me at school. By the time the school year ended I was cutting class so I wouldn’t have to be around her. I just couldn’t take it. To tell the truth, it was a relief to go into basic training.”
“If Wingate did engineer your notice, do you think he did it to break up your romance with his daughter?”
“It might have been one reason, but mostly I think he wanted me in the Unit. You know those special tests I took in basic, the way I was singled out for Special Forces. I think Wingate manipulated my career every step of the way.”
Ami was puzzled. “What is the Unit?”
Rice laughed. “It’s the little man that wasn’t there.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NORTH VIETNAM/ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA-1971
1
The pony team had been double-timing since the river, hours before, slowing only where the jungle was too dense to permit the pace. They stopped every hour for five minutes to rest and rehydrate; even with their superior conditioning the men could not go on forever in the heavy humidity of the monsoon season.
A few days earlier, Carl had been at Fort Bragg when a sergeant roused him from a deep sleep. He’d been loaded into a jet and flown to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where he had joined up with Neil Carpenter, an electronics expert, and boarded a plane bound for Nha Ha, the Special Forces base in Okinawa. Carl had never been on a real mission, and he was buzzing with energy by the time they landed. At Nha Ha, he learned that he was going to be part of a team that would be inserted into North Vietnam to recover special electronics equipment from a downed navy plane. The plane they were searching for had been located by heat-seeking
radar in a low, undulating, sparsely populated section of the North Vietnamese jungle fifteen miles from the nearest navigable entry route, a river tributary. Visual reconnaissance had been impossible because the canopy was triple-thick and fifty to sixty feet high. Not even the sun penetrated in many spots.
There were eight men on the team: Carl, Carpenter, five Green Berets they had picked up in Da Nang, and Captain Molineaux, the team leader. All the men except Carl had combat experience and were experts in jungle warfare, but Molineaux stood out. He was a little taller than Carl but seemed to tower over him. Where Carl was a bundle of nerves, Molineaux showed none. He spoke softly when he briefed the team in a Quonset hut in Da Nang shortly before the choppers lifted them out, and his calm demeanor never changed during the mission.
The choppers dropped the team as close to the river as the helicopter pilots dared. There was a mad dash through the jungle, then a silent vigil at the river until a navy gunboat materialized out of the mist. The boat ferried the team upriver to the opposite shore, then they were moving again, double-time. By the time the gunboat disappeared around a bend in the narrow tributary the team was lost in the thick undergrowth.
They had to move fast. The flybys that had located the downed plane had also recorded heavy troop movement in the area. For all they knew, the Vietnamese were looking for the same plane at the same time. Molineaux said that it was imperative to retrieve or destroy the electronics gear. No one asked why, and Carl never learned what the equipment did, though he wondered about it from time to time.
The team had one advantage over the enemy troops. Before bailing out, the pilot had set off a homing device that broadcast a signal over a top-secret band. Molineaux carried a triangulation device that picked up the signal. They could use it to make a beeline to the plane while the North Vietnamese would have to comb the entire area.
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