There weren't any cars or anything at the corner of Grand Street. Mickey stopped according to the rules, anyway. He looked both ways.
He looked back then-and the man was really close. Really, really close.
Mickey Kevin ran across Grand Street, and Aunt Mary K. would have killed him on the spot. His heart was pounding now. Really thumping out loud. Right down into his shoes, he could fell his heartbeat.
Then Mickey Kevin did the really, really dumb thing. He knew it the second he did it. The instant!
He cut through the empty lot at the Riverdale Day School.
There were all of these tricky bushes and stuff back there. Everybody left empty beer cans and broken wine and liquor bottles. Mary K. had forgotten to put that on the list: Don't cut through the Riverdale Day School lot. It was too obvious for words.
Mickey pushed the prickly bushes out of his way, and he thought he heard the man coming through the lot behind him. Crashing through the lot. He wasn't completely sure. He'd have to stop walking to listen so he could tell. He decided to just keep running, to run like hell.
Full speed ahead now. As fast as he could, with all the dark, thorny bushes, the hidden rocks and roots trying to trip him.
Mickey Kevin stumbled forward, his feet seeming to catch in dirt holes. He glided over slippery leaves. He nicked a rock and almost went over headfirst. He was panting now, his breath was too loud in his own ears, his footsteps were echoing like gunshots.
The back of his house suddenly appeared: the glowing amber porch lights, the familiar gray outline against the darker blackness of the night.
He had never been so glad to see home.
Fingers touched the side of his cheek, and Mickey yelled out, “Hey!”
A stupid tree branch!
He almost had a heart attack. Mickey ran across the last icy patch of back lawn. He ran like a midget halfback bound for seven. Halfway there, his metal lunch box popped open. It just about exploded-an orange, rolled-up papers, and a thermos tumbled out.
Mickey Kevin dropped the lunch box. He crashed up the back steps and put his hand on the cold metal storm door.
And then…
Mickey Kevin turned. He had to look back.
His chest was pounding nonstop now. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, like a huge machine was inside there. Making ice or something equally noisy. He had to look back.
Oh, brother! Oh boy, oh boy!
Nobody was behind him.
Nobody!
It was completely quiet in the backyard. Nothing moved. His lunch box lay in the middle of the snow. It glowed a little in the dark.
Mickey squinted real hard. He was feeling pretty stupid now. He'd made it all up; he was almost sure of it… But he still wasn't going to go back and pick up his lunch box. Maybe in the morning. Maybe in the spring sometime.
What a little baby! Afraid of the dark! He finally went in the house.
Mary K. was in the kitchen dicing vegetables with a big knife on the butcher block. The TV was turned on to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
“How was practice, Mickey Mouse? You look beat up. Wash, huh? Dinner's almost ready. I said-how was your basketball practice, fella?”
“Oh, uh… I don't know how to do a stupid lay-up. It was okay.”
Then Mickey Kevin smoothly disappeared, slid like a shadow into the downstairs bathroom. He didn't wash his hands and face, though, and he didn't turn on the overhead light.
Very slowly, he lifted a handful of lace curtain. He stared out into the dark, very creepola backyard, squinting his eyes tightly again.
He still couldn't see anybody.
The stupid cat, their stupid cat Mortimer, was playing with his lunch box. There was nobody else. Nobody had really chased him, he was suddenly sure.
But Mickey Kevin couldn't see the real-life bogeyman watching the Carroll house from the darkened back lot. He couldn't see the fearsome Sten machine pistol or the man holding it, fingering it so expertly.
Washington, D.C.
It was just after five o'clock when Colonel Duriel Williamson strode into a windowless office hidden away inside the twenty-nine-acre concrete complex known as the Pentagon.
Arch Carroll was already waiting in the Spartan, bureaucratic green room. So was Captain Pete Hawkins, who had formally escorted Carroll from the visitor's pickup desk back through the dizzying grid of tightly interlocking Pentagon corridors.
Colonel Williamson was an imposing black man. He was in the full-dress uniform of the U.S. Special Forces-including a blood-red beret, cocked jauntily. His hair, a bristly salt and pepper, was regulation length and looked appropriately stern. His voice was starched but showed heavy hints of irony.
Everything about Duriel Williamson said “No bullshit permitted here. State your business, mister.”
Captain Hawkins made the introductions in a polite if strictly formal military fashion. Hawkins was clearly a career bureaucrat, a survivor.
“Mr. Archer Carroll from the Defense Intelligence Agency, on special assignment by order of the president… Colonel Duriel Williamson from Special Forces. Colonel Williamson is stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Colonel Williamson was David Hudson's immediate superior during both phases of his Special Forces training. Colonel, Mr. Carroll is here to ask you some questions.”
The Special Forces officer smiled amicably. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Carroll. May I sit down?”
“Please, Colonel,” Carroll said. Both men sat down, followed by Captain Hawkins, who would remain in the room for the interview, a matter of protocol.
“What is it you need to know about David?”
“The two of you were on a first-name basis?”
“Yes, I knew David Hudson fairly well. I should amend that, to be as accurate as possible. I spent some time with David Hudson. Not at or because of the Special Forces school. This was after the war. I bumped into him a few times. At different veterans affairs, mostly. We were both active. We had a couple of beers together a couple of times.”
“Tell me about it, Colonel. What was Hudson like? What was he like to have a beer with?”
Carroll controlled his eagerness to ask more probing questions. His mind was still clouded from the long morning at the FBI, but he knew better than to pressure a Special Forces colonel.
“David Hudson was stiff at first. Though he tried like the devil not to be. Then he was just fine. He knew a lot about a lot of things. He was a thoughtful man, extremely bright.”
“Colonel Hudson's army career seemed to disintegrate after Vietnam. Do you know why?”
Duriel Williamson shrugged. “That's something that's always troubled me. All I can say is that David Hudson was a very outspoken man.”
“Meaning, Colonel?” Carroll continued to probe carefully.
“Meaning he was capable of making important enemies inside the army… He was also extremely disappointed. Bitter, I guess is the better word.”
Bitter, Carroll thought. Exactly how bitter? He studied the colonel in silence.
“The treatment our men got after Vietnam made David Hudson a very angry person. I think it disillusioned him more than most of us. He considered it a natural disgrace. He blamed President Nixon at first. He wrote personal letters to the president, also to the chief of staff.”
“Just letters? Was that the extent of his protests for the veterans?” I need somebody, Carroll thought, with the kind of bitterness that would go well beyond letters. Hell, anybody could sit down and write a crank letter.
“Actually, no. He was involved in several of the more vocal protests.”
“Colonel, any answers you can elaborate on would be helpful. I've got all night to listen.”
“He called attention to Washington 's long string of broken promises to our veterans. All the betrayals. ‘The disposable GI’ was a phrase he liked to use… Let me tell you, Mr. Carroll, that kind of high-profile activity can earn you a fast assignment to Timbuktu, or to some Podunk reserve unit. That would put him in the Pentagon
computers, too. Hudson was very active with radical veterans.”
“What about his training at the Special Forces school? At Fort Bragg?” Carroll then asked. “Colonel, please try to be thorough.”
“Some of this was quite a while ago. It didn't seem so important at the time. I'll try.”
For almost an hour Colonel Williamson painstakingly described a brilliant young army officer, with boundless energy, with small-town American enthusiasm and talent-a model soldier. Many of the epithets Carroll had read earlier in the 211 files, he heard again from Colonel Williamson.
“What I remember most, though,” Williamson said, “what stands out to this day about Hudson, is the time at Fort Bragg. We were instructed to push and drive him. Push him to his physical and emotional limits. We redlined David Hudson at Bragg.”
“More than other officers who were assigned to the Bragg program?”
“Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Without any doubt we pushed him more. No punches were pulled. His POW experience was used to pump up his hatred for ‘our enemies.’ Hudson was programmed to seek revenge, to hate. In my opinion, he was a walking time bomb.”
“Who instructed you to do that, Colonel? Who told you to push Colonel Hudson? Somebody obviously must have singled him out for special attention.”
Colonel Hudson paused. His dark eyes didn't leave Carroll's face, but there was a perceptible change in him. Carroll couldn't quite read the change at first.
“I suppose you're right. At this point, uh, after all these years… I'm not sure I can tell you who, though… Isn't that funny? I remember we were unusually tough on him. Also that Hudson was pretty much up to it. He definitely had character to spare. Great stamina. The heart of a teenager.”
“But his training wasn't typical, not the regular course? His was different somehow?”
“Yes. David Hudson's training at Fort Bragg was beyond the established norm, which was demanding in itself.”
“Give me some idea, Colonel. Put me at the training camp. Can you make it come alive for me? What was the actual training like?”
“All right. I don't think you can imagine it, unless you actually went through it… Up at two-thirty in the morning. Physical abuse. Drug-induced nightmares. Interrogation by the best in the army. Pushed like a dirt-farm tractor until you dropped at eight. Up again at two-thirty-I mean pushed, drained. Each day was one hundred percent harder than the last. Physically and emotionally, and psychologically… The men chosen to go to Bragg were all considered top rank. Hudson had West Point and extensive combat behind him. He'd been a successful commander in ' Nam… Uh, Colonel Hudson was also a military assassin in Vietnam. He was very heavy. With a good rep.”
Carroll, hearing the word assassin, felt that he had taken still another step into the endless Green Band maze. The farther he moved, the more confusing it became. The all-American soldier had an even darker side: assassin. He brought Hudson 's clean-cut image in the photographs back to mind: the sunshine face of determination, the crew cut, the honesty in the eyes.
“Meaning what, Colonel? What does a good rep mean in that context? As a military assassin.”
“It means he wasn't a thrill killer-which most of the top hitters were… A very real problem is what to do with some of those guys once they leave the army. If the generals had decided to take out Ho Chi Minh, someone very big, very delicate, Hudson most likely would have been considered. I'm telling you, he was one of the fair-haired boys.”
“You seem a little awed by Hudson yourself.”
Williamson smiled absently; he finally chuckled softly into his chest full of medals. “I don't know about awe. Awe isn't the right word. Definitely respect, though.”
“Why?”
“He was one of the best soldiers I've ever trained. He had physical endurance and all the technical skills. He had strength and tremendous smarts. A martial-arts background. He also had something else. Dignity.”
“So what went wrong? What happened to Hudson after the war? Why did he finally leave the army in 1976?”
Colonel Williamson rubbed his hard-boned, clean-shaven jaw. “As I said, the one potential problem was his attitude. He could be extremely judgmental… He also thought he had answers to some controversial army problems. Some career officers might not have appreciated Hudson 's judgment of them and their actions. The other thing was the loss of his arm. David Hudson had big, big plans for himself. How many one-armed generals are you aware of?”
Arch Carroll thought before he spoke again. For all the apparent cooperation, he had a sneaking feeling that Colonel Williamson was still holding something back. It was the army way, he remembered from extensive past dealings with the Pentagon. Everything had to be a huge “need to know” secret, shared only inside the sacred fraternity of army blood brothers, shared only with the other warriors.
“Colonel Williamson, I've got to ask the next few questions with the authority of the commander in chief. That means I need complete answers.”
“That's what you've been getting, Mr. Carroll.”
“Colonel Williamson, did you know the official purpose of David Hudson's Special Forces training at Fort Bragg? Why was he at the JFK school? If that information was in any of your orders, if you heard it anywhere on the base I need to know it.”
Colonel Duriel Williamson stared back hard at Arch Carroll, then at Captain Hawkins. When he spoke, his voice was softer, deeper than it had been. “Nothing was ever written down in any of the orders… As I said, I don't remember who actually issued our daily orders. I do know why he was supposed to be there, though…”
“Go on. Please, Colonel Williamson.”
“It was something we were told at the very first briefing on David Hudson. Verbally told. The first briefing sounded like total CIA bullshit, by the way. Until we actually met Hudson… You see… they told us Colonel David Hudson had been specially chosen to be our version of the Third World superterrorist. David Hudson was selected and trained to be our version of the terrorist Juan Carlos.”
Arch Carroll became very tense now. He leaned forward on his chair. “That's why he was at the Bragg school? Why he was pushed ahead, beyond all the others?”
“That's what we helped teach him to be… And Mr. Carroll, Hudson was frightening. He is still frightening, I'm sure. From potentially planning a terrorist raid to even a cold-blooded mass murder, if it was necessary, David Hudson was on a level with Carlos. He's on a level with that madman Monserrat!… The United States Army trained Hudson to be the best in the world… and in my opinion, he was. Maybe that's why they couldn't keep him content in the peacetime army.”
Carroll didn't speak-because right at that moment he couldn't. The realization that the United States Army had secretly trained its own Carlos, and that he had now quite possibly turned, was unbelievable. Colonel Williamson's words rang in his ears: From potentially planning a terrorist raid to even a cold-blooded mass murder, if it was necessary.
“Colonel Williamson, in your opinion, could David Hudson have been involved with Green Band? Could he have technically masterminded an operation like that?”
“I don't doubt it, Mr. Carroll. He has all the technical skills.”
Williamson sighed. “One more fact about Colonel David Hudson, though. When I knew him, at least, and I think I knew the man fairly well, he loved the United States very much. He loved America. Make no mistake, David Hudson was a patriot.”
When Arch Carroll drove out of the vast, nearly empty Pentagon parking area at a little past ten that night, his mind was rapidly turning over all kinds of possibilities. Finally, something had connected. Something made sense in Green Band.
As he drove, weary and stone-faced, to the Washington Hotel, he tried to review the long day. His eyes were red and they burned. But he felt legitimately close to something for the first time since Green Band had begun.
Colonel David Hudson was trained to be our version of Carlos… our version of Monserrat.
David Hudson was a patriot.
Was David Hudson also a traitor? Perhaps the most significant traitor since Benedict Arnold?
A blue sedan unobtrusively followed Arch Carroll as he drove through the suburban fringes of Washington. Both cars slipped and curled around icy George Washington Parkway. When Carroll turned onto Constitution Avenue at a sedate thirty-five miles an hour, so did the blue sedan.
A team of eight professionals then alternated through the night both in and outside Georgetown 's Washington Hotel. They watched to see if Arch Carroll went out, if he met anyone else at the hotel, if he tried to reach Colonel Duriel Williamson or Samantha Hawes.
Carroll's room and telephone were expertly bugged. There was a single incoming call, which was recorded by the surveillance team.
“Hello. This is Carroll speaking.”
“Archer, it's Walter. I just spoke with Mike Caruso. He said you were in Washington.”
“It's as weird as ever down here, Walter. Maybe even a little weirder right now.”
“Mike told me about your latest theory. I think it's a good one. One thing bothers me a lot. I wonder why Phil Berger warned you off the track of Viet veterans earlier?”
“I wondered about that, too. Maybe he thought he had it covered. At any rate, I'm definitely touching exposed nerves down here.”
“Well, be careful about that. Philip Berger and the CIA aren't easy to fool, or to underestimate, either. And Archer-”
“Yeah, I know, I'll try to keep you involved.”
“If you don't, you could wind up all alone on this. And I mean all alone. I'm serious, Archer. Be careful as hell in Washington.”
Carroll made one call home to Riverdale and a second to Caitlin Dillon in Manhattan. He made a late call to Samantha Hawes at her home in Arlington. Then he slept.
The surveillance team was wide-awake.
33
It was past one-thirty in the morning and the White House was quiet, deceptively still, along the second floor. The president was feeling completely debilitated and old, decades older than his forty-two years. The sheen of sweat covering his neck was cold, and it made him feel ill.
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