by Brian Haig
It took about thirty seconds, then I said, “Listen, I think I’m in real deep shit, and I need some help.” Raw candor was always the best way to deal with Tingle.
“All right, spill it, Drummond.”
And I did. I spilled everything that had happened, right down to breaking into Jones’s room and stealing his passport and ID. He listened to it all and said nothing for a moment.
Finally he broke the silence. “Don’t know nothin’ about it.” “I didn’t think you did. That’s not why I called.”
“Why did you call?”
“I need to find out more about this Jack Tretorne guy.” “And you figure I can do that?”
“Yes, sir.You’ve got all kinds of contacts up there. Maybe you can find who I’m up against.”
There was a long silence for another moment. I heard Tingle cough a few times. On a secure phone, it sounded like little mines detonating in his throat. He really needed to quit smoking.
He finally said, “All right, Drummond. By the way, you ever hear of Operation Phoenix?”
I said, “Vaguely. One of those Vietnam things, wasn’t it?” “Right. Look it up,” he ordered me. “I’ll get back to you.” “Colonel,” I said, “if you don’t mind, that’s not a good idea. I think my phones are bugged. I’ll call you.”
“Whatever.”
“By the way, I ran into another outfit vet out here. A Sergeant Major Williams. Remember him?”
“We’ve had three Williamses come through the outfit. Of course, one died. Mogadishu, I think.Yeah, it was Mogadishu. Poor bastard.”
“This one’s still kicking. He worked the POW hard sell when I went through screening. He told me you kept having him kick the crap out of me.”
“Ahh, that asshole. You stay away from him. He’s a bad egg.” “Really?”
“One of them white supremacist nuts.Was even helping train some group of goombahs in the backwoods. Williams was a real wacko. That’s why we booted him out.”
“How’d you find that out?” I asked.
“Ah, we tapped all of your phones. Bet you never knew that, did ya?”
I instantly tried to recall every phone conversation I had ever had when I was with the outfit. “No, sir,” I managed to croak.
“Oh yeah,” he said, “I heard every word you ever said about me, Drummond.”
“Well, you know. The heart grows fonder and all that crap.” “Okay, Drummond, get back to it. And watch your ass, boy. Don’t forget. Read up on Phoenix.”
I hung up, returned the secure key to the duty sergeant, and walked back to my tent. Then I lay down and got three more hours of sleep before I showered and shaved, got dressed again, and went to our little wooden building.
Imelda was still asleep on her cot by the file cabinets when I came in. She could’ve had one of her girls do the guard duty, but that wasn’t Imelda’s style. I tiptoed over to the coffeemaker and prepared a pot. Then I went into my office and waited till it was percolated. Imelda awoke while I was pouring a cup.
“Fix two,” she growled.
“Cream or sugar?”
“Black. Bone black. That cream and sugar, that crap’ll kill ya.” “Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled. I quickly maneuvered my shoulder to block her view as I added a third spoonful of sugar to mine.
While Imelda crawled out of her sleeping bag I carried the two cups over, politely turning around to give the lady some privacy. After a minute I heard her stomping her combat boots on the floor, and I turned back and handed her the coffee. Then I hooked a finger and indicated for her to follow me.
I sat at my desk and began writing on a legal pad while asking, “So, how’d you sleep?”
“Good as can be. You?”
“Like a baby. Went to bed early and got the first full night of rest since we got here,” I said, holding up what I’d written on the page.
It read, “Research this: Operation Phoenix.”
She shrugged her shoulders.“Good. Maybe you won’t be such a grumpy asshole to my girls anymore.”
I wrote out: “Vietnam era. Might find it on Internet.”
I said, “Today, what I’d like to do is work on the summary statement. I told Delbert and Morrow I’d write it.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, also nodding her head at what I wrote on the paper.
“You know how I like to do these things. I’ll be wandering in and out all day, trying to compose my thoughts.”
“You don’t need to tell me, Major. I know how you like to work.”
“Good. Thanks, Imelda.”
“No problem,” she said, wandering back out of my office.
In the interest of authenticity, since I couldn’t be sure whether one or more of Imelda’s girls was informing on me, I quickly began scribbling out a long, rambling statement about how Sanchez and his men were completely innocent of all charges. I wrote fast and didn’t worry about syntax or literary refinement. It only had to be convincing enough that if anyone checked, they would believe I was doing my part in the whitewash.
I scribbled for two hours, then there was a knock on the door. When I looked up, Martie whoever and David the wimp, my two favorite CID agents, were standing there.
“What?” I said.
“Could you spare another moment of your time, Major?” Martie asked.
I decided to be politic. “Sure. Can I get you coffee?”
“No thanks,” he said as the two of them entered and sank into the chairs across from my desk. “We’ve already had half a dozen cups. I’m jittery as hell.”
Their haberdashery had not improved in the past two days. Today Martie was dressed in a checkered suit, with a checkered shirt and a checkered tie. He looked like a walking chessboard done in three shades. David wore a more conservative chintzy-looking blue blazer, a dark blue shirt, and a garish tie covered with pastel-colored flowers that looked as if they were exploding. He reminded me of a hybrid between a mobster and Bozo the Clown. These guys were hard to take seriously.
“How’s the investigation going?” I asked.
“Oh, you know. A piece here, a piece there. These kinds of things, you rarely find a golden nugget that breaks it all open. Usually it takes a lot of small clues.”
“You took the footprints, right?”
“Yeah. They’re back in the lab in Heidelberg.”
“Anything else interesting in Berkowitz’s notebook?” “Tough to tell. You learn a lot about a guy when you investigate his death. Take Berkowitz. The guy was a real slob. Dirty clothes and candy wrappers everywhere. Left notes and scribbles all over his damn room. We’re still sorting through it.”
“I heard there’s lots of new reporters in town.”
“A whole army. They’re climbing all over the information officer’s ass. And you know how the feeding cycle works. They chew on his ass, he chews on mine.”
“I guess,” I said. “So is there anything specific you want to talk about?”
“Uh, yeah, actually.” He looked up and stared at my ceiling. “Just thought I should inform you that I’ve got two agents in your tent right now. I’ve got a military judge’s order to search your personal possessions and to borrow your running shoes.”
I didn’t like the sound of this one bit. I took a sip of coffee and tried not to look distressed. This wasn’t easy. I was feeling very distressed. I don’t know why, I just was.
I gave him a hard stare. “And may I ask why?”
“Just some lingering concerns about a few notes Berkowitz left behind. Don’t get all bothered, though. We’re just borrowing your shoes to compare them with some molds back at the lab.”
“But I shouldn’t be concerned?”
“No. It’s just standard procedure. We’re collecting lots of molds. You never set foot in that latrine, right?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“Then we’ll get you cleared faster than you can say Jack the Ripper.”
Chapter 22
One thing you learn when you practice criminal la
w is that the moment a police officer tells you not to be concerned, start gnawing on your nails. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I didn’t have anyway near enough time or attention to worry. I kept writing my opus summary while I waited for Imelda to bring me some materials on Operation Phoenix.
She waltzed back in at quarter after eleven and dropped a bunch of printouts on my desk.
“Where have you been?” I bellowed.
She bent over and began writing on my yellow legal pad. “Workin’,” she said.“I made the supply run, then ran all over this damn post lookin’ for printer cartridges.”
I watched what she was writing. I said, “Well, I’ve gotten a lot of work done, and I want someone to start typing.”
“And what’s with you?” she barked.“Is your ass glued to that chair or something? You can’t tell those clerks to type?”
She straightened back up and I read what she had written. “Found on Internet. To be safe, used supply room terminal.”
“Okay, okay,” I grumbled.“Just take what I’ve finished and get it typed.”
She collected my stack of yellow pages and departed. I grabbed the printouts she left behind and dug in. It took nearly thirty minutes. There was a lot of stuff on the Internet concerning Operation Phoenix. There were extracts from history books. There were testaments from guilt-ridden veterans who were participants. There were some wild ramblings from anti-war groups who made reference to it in fairly negative ways. Some of the articles made for pretty fascinating reading, and some made you wonder if everyone who posted things on the Internet had all their marbles.
Operation Phoenix was a secret operation run jointly between the CIA and the Green Berets during the Vietnam War. A secret pact was made between the two that actually bypassed the military chain of command. Neither the Joint Chiefs nor General Westmoreland even knew it was happening.
It was a classic counterinsurgency operation where the CIA penetrated a number of communist cells that were operating in South Vietnam, then the Special Forces did the nasty work of eliminating the suspects. Some of the material Imelda got off the Internet said the Green Berets only killed a few dozen operatives. Others claimed they killed thousands. Killed them without trial, without proof, just knocked off whoever the CIA told them to take out. The sterile euphemism they used was “sanctioned.”
I guess I was too engrossed in trying to study the anatomy of my high school cheerleading squad to have been paying attention, but the operation got exposed sometime in the early or mid-seventies, just as the war was winding down. Then there was a mad rush by various congressional investigating committees to help the Army sort fact from fiction, to borrow General Partridge’s phrase. The word for what the Green Berets were doing was assassination. The words for what the CIA was doing was playing God. It was a war, but the people being summarily executed were South Vietnamese citizens, thus technically our allies. That’s a pretty vital distinction.
I saw immediately why Bill Tingle wanted me to research this. I mean, it made a lot of sense. Here was Jack Tretorne, aka Mr. Jones, masquerading as an NSA employee while he helped cover up a possible massacre committed by a Green Beret team. You couldn’t escape the parallels. Still, it struck me as beyond stupidity. Operation Phoenix had apparently led to an explosive scandal, and I just couldn’t believe that the same folks who did it the first time would turn right around and try it again. That’s like Ford Motor Company trying to reintroduce the Edsel.
Besides, this was not a war. At least, technically this was not war. There were no communist cells being infiltrated, no suspects being assassinated. This was a NATO police action, or whatever silly word was being used to describe an attempt to coerce the Serbs by bombing the crap out of them. As simple as that.
On the other hand, there was the murder of Jeremy Berkowitz. Maybe Tretorne told General Murphy to “sanction” him. As bizarre as that sounded, everything going on here struck me as bizarre. So why not? Tretorne seemed to me to be exactly the kind of guy who would order someone killed in cold blood. There was no sign of life or moral gravity in those eyes of his. And, if a man would help engineer a cover-up, then he was already breaking some very serious laws. What was a few more?
I decided I needed to be cheered up. All morning I’d been working out another scheme, and I decided its time had come. It was time to do some flushing, as they say in quail-hunting circles.
I left the office and walked back over to the NSA facility. The guards passed me through to the inner sanctum, I pushed the doorbell and looked up and stuck out my tongue at the camera in the corner. Sometimes I wonder how I ever made major.
A moment later, the door made that humming sound, and I pushed it open. Miss Smith was waiting. I gave her a shy grin, and she returned it with one of those wonderfully plastic smiles she must have perfected at some northeastern preppy college. She reminded me of a thousand cheerleaders I used to lust after.
“How are you today?” I asked.
“Fine.”
“That’s nice. I hope this isn’t inconvenient, but I need to talk with Mr. Jones again.”
“Follow me,” she said, and I studied her lovely sway as she led me back through the building, then to the stairway in the rear. We went down the stairs again, and I noticed that her hair roots were brown, not blond. The more I learned about this woman, the less real she seemed.
We reached the conference room at the end of the hall again, and Miss Smith’s long, manicured fingers very elegantly slid her little plastic card through the lock slot, then she pushed the door open. There were about five men in the room, all sitting around the table, with Jack Tretorne at the head. Aside from Tretorne, it looked like a nerd’s convention. There were lots of thick bifocals and pocket penholders and short-sleeve white shirts. These were NSA employees, no doubt about it. They had that certain charisma.
Tretorne had on his duck-murdering vest again. He looked badly out of place, like a jock at a software programmers’ convention. He glanced up and the room fell quiet. If I were a courteous guy,I would’ve said,“Excuse me.I’m obviously interrupting, so why don’t I just leave and you can call me when it’s convenient for you.”
I didn’t say anything; I just stood there. Tretorne’s marble eyes studied me, but I had no idea what he was thinking. Then he looked around the table and said, “If you all can please excuse us for a few moments, Major Drummond here is working on a very critical project, and I must speak with him. Alone.”
The nerds all got up and began filing out of the room. Finally, it was just the three of us, and Miss Smith closed the door.
“Hi,” I said.
He got right to the point. “What do you want?”
“I just need a few minutes. I’m preparing our summary, and I have to get a few questions answered. You understand, right?”
I collapsed into a chair before he could answer. I looked over my shoulder. “Miss Smith, would you be a good girl and fetch me a cup of coffee? Three sugars and just a small dose of cream.”
The lovely Miss Smith’s face turned instantly ugly. “I don’t fetch things, and don’t call me a good girl.”
I smiled. “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were Mr. Jones’s administrative assistant.”
I could see Jones nodding his head furiously for her to do what I asked. She pouted for about two seconds, then whirled around and walked back through the door.
I said,“Boy, has she got an attitude. How do you put up with that?”
Jones’s eyes were studying me very coldly. It was a little like being examined by that mechanical camera upstairs. “She’s all right,” he assured me.“This isn’t the Army, Drummond. We fetch our own coffee around here. Now, what do you want?”
“Well, remember yesterday when we looked at those films, and you read those radio transcriptions?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Good. I’ll need some kind of verification that all that was authentic. Also, you mentioned that the films will be stored in a file at NSA. I’l
l need some kind of reference or name for that file.”
“I can get you that,” he said. He smiled. This was all so easy. “Gee, that’s great,” I said. “One other thing. I’m gonna need your full name, social security number, and where you work at NSA.”
Oops, it was not so easy anymore. The smile was instantly replaced by a deeply perplexed look as he said, “Why?”
“Well, since you wouldn’t let me have the films or transcripts, you know, them being too sensitive and all, I have to cite you as a material witness in my exhibit. This is a highly controversial incident we’re investigating. The findings are going to be closely scrutinized. I can hardly write that I met with some jerk from NSA named Jones and leave it at that. I mean, how many Joneses are there at NSA? Must be a thousand or so, wouldn’t you guess?”
Tretorne’s jaw, I noticed, became very tight. There was very little body fat on his face, and right at that moment, those two little muscles just below his ears were ticking like time bombs. My obnoxiousness was breaking through the iceberg.
Just at that moment, he was saved by the bell. Miss Smith traipsed back through the door with my cup of coffee in hand. She gave it to me, and I took a sip. It was cold as ice, and she must have added half a jar of cream and at least ten large spoonfuls of sugar. The girl had spunk. I liked that.
I cranked back my neck and drained the whole thing. “Ah, just the way I like it. Thanks, honey.” Take that for spunk, bitch.
Miss Smith tried to take this in stride, but I noticed that she stomped a little as she worked her way around the table and took a seat near the opposite end. Unfortunately, Tretorne had recovered his composure.
He leaned across the table and, in a tellingly reasonable tone, said,“Listen close, Drummond. I’m not going to be listed in your report. Let’s get that clear. My work requires me to do sensitive work, and I cannot risk being exposed. Just use the name of the NSA chief, Lieutenant General Foster.”
I grinned. “Hey, don’t sweat it, Jonesy, old pal. My report’s going to have ‘Top Secret Special Category’ stamped all over it. You won’t be exposed. Besides, General Foster had nothing to do with this.”
