“You have never been careful before, Sergeant,” Lowell said. “Believe me.”
MacMillan waddled to the edge of the tower; and looking somewhat bored, he picked up the rope that hung over the edge, wrapped it around his waist, snapped it into the D ring, adjusted it so that it was taut, and then leaned backward over the side.
“Watch carefully, Duke,” he said. “I’m not going to climb those damned stairs again.”
The master sergeant handed Mac a leather work glove, and he put it on his right hand. Then he simply jumped backward off the six-story rappelling tower. Fifteen feet down, he bounced against the side, and then pushed himself away again.
“Jesus Christ!” Lowell said. Looking over the edge made him dizzy.
“It’s not as bad as it looks, Colonel,” the master sergeant said. “Just don’t look down at first if it makes you dizzy.”
“And let the ground come up as a surprise?” he asked.
“You’ll sense when you’re close to the ground,” the master sergeant said. “Would you like to watch it again?”
“Absolutely,” Lowell said. He nodded at Felter. “If he doesn’t go, I don’t go.”
Felter, grinning, allowed himself to be roped into a harness, and then went over the edge with as much ease as MacMillan had.
“It’s not hard, Colonel,” the master sergeant said.
“Colonels Felter and MacMillan are well known for their insanity,” Lowell said. Then: “OK, let’s do it.”
The staff sergeant roped him in the harness, while the master sergeant wrapped himself.
“I’ll go down with you, Colonel,” he said. “If you want to stop yourself, just do it. No problem.”
“As the bishop said to the nun,” Lowell said.
He made the rope taut, put on a leather-palmed glove, and forced himself to stand, backward, on the edge of the platform. He looked down at the rope and the harness. The way it fit around his midsection, it bunched the ripstops into what looked like an oversized camouflage jockstrap.
He remembered the touch of Dorothy Sims’s hand. She had indeed made him feel young enough to be doing something like this. What the hell! He pushed himself into space, and almost immediately applied friction. He fell about three feet.
“You can give it a little more, Colonel,” the master sergeant said. He let loose, pushed himself away from the wall, and let himself fall as far as he dared. There was an elastic sensation, as if he were at the end of an enormous rubber band.
“You’ve got the idea, Colonel,” the master sergeant said.
“It’s as easy as falling off a six-story building,” Lowell said. He was now pleased with himself. Four bounds later—too soon—he sensed that he was getting close to the ground. When he looked down, he saw it was five feet below him.
He had just been set to push himself off again for a long swoop. If he had done that, he would have crashed heavily into the ground.
Felter and MacMillan watched him, smiling, as he opened the D ring and got loose of the rope.
“Now that wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be, was it, son?” MacMillan said, mockingly solicitous.
“I think I’ll do it again,” Lowell said. “If I can make it up the stairs.”
He climbed the stairs with his mind full of Dorothy Sims. Logic told him that it had been her long abstinence rather than anything he had done…but there was no denying that having a woman thrashing beneath him in glorious passion did wonderful things for his ego. That had been one hell of a piece of ass.
Or was she just an oversexed lady who latched onto visiting officers? She was, he supposed, about thirty-five. Women were supposed to be at their sexual peak in those years. What was she supposed to do, with her husband gone, use a banana?
In fact, he believed what she said about getting a divorce. When Tom came home.
If Tom came home.
If they were successful.
According to Sandy’s list, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas B. Sims, USAF, was in the Hanoi Hilton.
Hang tight, Colonel. The Green Berets are on the way, after a brief pause for station identification, during which I am diddling your loving wife.
Welcome home, darling. You will be hearing from my lawyers.
The staff sergeant was waiting for him on the top of the rappelling tower. Lowell was pleased to see that the master sergeant was huffing and puffing as much as he was when he came through the stairwell.
He went down the rope four more times, until he felt very confident. The last two trips were from the skid of a Huey, which had been mounted to the tower on four by eights so that it was five feet away from the wall of the tower. You could still stop yourself whenever you wanted to, but there was no wall to plant your feet against and stop the oscillation. You swung back and forth like a rock tied to the end of a string.
Whether by coincidence, or more likely by intent, a Huey—an HU-1D—appeared. It fluttered near the mock-up while Lowell was catching his breath after the fourth trip up the stairs.
When he slid to the ground the final time, still wearing the rope harness and D ring, they walked over to the Huey. The pilot, who was sitting on the floor of the cargo compartment, stood up when he saw them coming. He saluted.
“Nice to see you again, Colonel Lowell,” he said, putting out his hand. “I heard you were in on this.”
Lowell looked at Felter, who nodded, a signal the pilot had been cleared for Operation Monte Cristo.
“I’m glad you are,” Lowell said. “It’s nice to see you, too.”
“The way this works, Colonel,” the pilot said, “is that I will hover somewhere around one hundred feet over the roof—you know how hard that is to do—to keep your oscillation down. You will not be given the word to go down the rope until we’re in the best hover I can manage. Once you get the word from the crew chief, get out as quick as you can. There will be some movement of the aircraft from the imbalance. Once you start to oscillate, the only way you can stop it is to start down the rope again in the middle of the swing. You understand, sir?”
“All things considered, I’d rather be driving,” Lowell said.
The pilot smiled at him, and went on. “Get out of the harness immediately. There will be another change of center of gravity the moment you touch down and the rope goes slack. Unless you get free of the rope right away, you’re liable to be dragged off the roof.”
“You’re just a fountain of pleasant information, aren’t you?” Lowell said.
“We’ll be a little light, with just the five of us,” MacMillan said. “Did you bring ballast?”
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said. “Everybody’s in there. A thousand pounds of sand, and all the field equipment.”
For the first time, Lowell looked closely inside the fuselage. There was a pile of field equipment, web belts and ammo pouches, even weapons. And strapped to the nylon-and-aluminum seats were bags, each stenciled BALLAST 50 POUNDS.
The crew chief stood at the door holding out a set of web equipment. Lowell reached for it. It was suspenders, a web belt with a .45 in a holster, several magazine pouches for the M-16 rifle, and even two concussion grenades taped to the suspenders. He strapped the suspenders on. It had been a very long time since he had worn web equipment. This was brand-new stuff, nylon. He wondered idly if nylon was such a good idea. Nylon burns. He didn’t think the old stuff—what was it, cotton?—would burn.
The crew chief handed him an M-16 rifle. Loosening the strap, he put it across his shoulders. He was the last one finished dressing. The others didn’t tease him about it or offer to help. They just waited. There’s one guy in every squad, Lowell thought, who is always last.
He stepped inside the Huey. He had a lot of time in Hueys, but very little time in the back seat of one. The crew chief indicated where he was to sit, between two of the seats stacked with fifty pounds of ballast.
The turbine began to whine, and the rotor blades slowly began to revolve. He looked up and saw the crew chief touch his mike butt
on, apparently telling the pilot they were ready any time he was.
The pitch of the turbine and the rotor changed, and Lowell felt the chopper grow light on the skids. The pilot picked it two feet off the ground, lowered the nose, and made a running takeoff in the direction of the mock-up, keeping low across the ground until he had the speed he wanted, then pulling up on the cyclic, jerking the bird into the air.
They passed over the mock-up at fifty feet. Lowell wished he were closer to the door so that he could get a better look at it, but then reminded himself he would in a couple of minutes be on it, where he could take a really close-up look at it.
The Huey banked, maybe half a mile from the mock-up, at five hundred feet now, and out the open door Lowell could see that the area was ringed with concertina: barbed wire in three-foot coils. Not the old barbed wire but the new stuff, flat ribbons of razor-sharp steel. He thought he saw a guard post, but he wasn’t sure. They were certainly there, because Sandy Felter certainly would have sealed off the entire area like a drum.
The Huey leveled off and slowed down.
The crew chief, in an olive drab flying helmet that concealed most of his head, made a “get-up” signal with his hands. They were making a slow, flat descent back to the mock-up. Apparently on orders from the pilot, the crew chief threw a coil of rope out each door, outside the skid so the rope could not interfere with the VHF antenna mounted on the bottom of the fuselage.
MacMillan and the staff sergeant hooked the rope to their D rings and stood facing inward, holding themselves in place with a hand placed flat against the top of the door opening, looking over their shoulders.
The Huey’s engine pitch changed. The most difficult maneuver of a helicopter is a hover outside ground effect. This was what the pilot was now attempting. Lowell could sense the minute changes he was making with the cyclic and with the stick. He could not, for the life of him, remember the pilot’s name, but he remembered he was a good one.
And then all of a sudden, simultaneously, MacMillan and the staff sergeant launched themselves into the air, jumping backward over the skid. Lowell thought he could detect a slight upward (as their weight left the helicopter) and then downward (as they brought their weight back by stopping their descent movement), but he wasn’t sure.
He stepped closer to the door and saw the staff sergeant first, and then MacMillan, land on the flat roof of the mock-up. Immediately, they unstrapped their rifles and moved to the edges of the roof, MacMillan training his rifle on the courtyard, and the sergeant pointing his at the ground outside.
Felter nudged him, pointed to the rope. Lowell picked it up, put it in the D ring, and stood in the door, wondering how hard he was going to have to jump to get over the skid.
The crew chief, now standing in the center of the passenger compartment, legs spread, one hand flat on the roof, looked to see that Lowell and the master sergeant were ready to go. He held his balled fist in front of him and then extended the thumb upward. Then he made a sudden up-ending motion. The thumb was now pointed down.
“Shit!” Lowell said, aloud, and pushed himself backward out of the helicopter. The skid passed in front of his nose, and he saw that some of the OD paint had flaked off, exposing the reddish primer paint beneath. Then he applied friction, and his descent ended in an elastic jerk. He started to swing from side to side under the helicopter, and at the same time began to spin around on the rope.
He saw that the master sergeant was far beneath him. Lowell let loose and felt himself dropping. When he stopped the slide, he was oscillating worse than ever. He remembered that he had been told to start his descents only when he was in the middle of the oscillations. He hadn’t done that. He would the next time.
He let go, and the next thing he knew, he had crashed into the roof. Damn it! His leg and knee hurt. Stupid!
He remembered to unsnap the rope from the D ring. MacMillan looked over to see if he needed help.
He forced a smile and gave a little wave, then looked up to watch Sandy come sliding down the line as if he had been doing it all his life.
This whole fucking thing is a facade, Lowell thought as he painfully flexed his knee. I’m not going to be sliding down a goddamned rope, and Sandy isn’t even going to be there. Sandy will be on the aircraft carrier drinking coffee. Sandy was too much walking-around information to risk having him captured. Commanders are too valuable to risk sliding down ropes.
He was surprised MacMillan hadn’t figured out yet that he was not going to get the actual command, time in grade or no time in grade. There was a sop to his ego on the final operations order. He was to be “commander of ground troops.”
But the Commander of Air Landing, Consolidation, and Air Evacuation—in other words, the whole show once they took off from the carrier—was Colonel Craig W. Lowell.
Sandy unhooked himself and ran over with concern on his face.
For me? No way. For the operation?
“You OK? You landed with a bang.”
“I’m all right. I just need a little practice is all. This is hardly my line of work.”
Lowell forced himself to his feet. It hurt like hell, but nothing seemed to be broken.
He noticed that the Huey was on the ground. The pilot must have made one hell of a skillful autorotation. Lowell made a note to make sure that the landing plan was changed. The Huey was right in front of the main door to the building. There would certainly be guards there, even if most of them were trying to see what the hell had happened in the courtyard.
“What are you thinking?” Sandy asked.
“We shouldn’t land Number Three right in front of the door,” Lowell said. Sandy picked up on it immediately. His nod showed understanding; and you could take it to the bank that the plan would be corrected. Sandy was a master of detail.
“You all right, Colonel?” the master sergeant asked.
“Nothing that a stiff drink won’t fix,” Lowell said. “And some Sloane’s Liniment.”
“The drink I can arrange,” the master sergeant said. He handed Lowell his canteen. It was full of bourbon.
He got Sloane’s Liniment in the drug store in the shopping center. He also bought epsom salts and an Ace bandage. Jesus Christ, he hoped that nothing was broken or badly sprained. He really wanted to make this operation.
He had just filled the bathtub with hot water when the telephone rang.
He hobbled over to it. It had to be either Felter or Bellmon. He had given the number that was ringing only to them. MacMillan and Hanrahan and the others had the second number.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, yourself,” Dorothy Sims said.
“Oh,” he said, astonishingly glad to hear her voice. “How are you?”
“How are you?” she countered.
“Would you believe I sprained my knee?”
“I was about to go out to the drug store,” she said. “Is there anything I could get for you?”
“Nothing you can buy in a drug store,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “I’d be happy to. But I can’t stay but just a minute. I have to pick up Tommy after Scouts.”
Somebody, Lowell deduced, could hear her talking.
She hung up without saying anything else.
He hobbled back into the bath and lowered himself into the steaming epsom-salted water. In a few minutes, he heard the key in the door, and then the door slamming against the intruder chain. Damn, he’d forgotten about that.
He heaved himself out of the tub and hobbled, dripping, to the door, with a towel wrapped around his middle.
She saw him favoring the leg.
“You really did hurt it, didn’t you?” she asked. “Let me have a look at it.”
He got on the bed, propping his back against the plastic-covered headboard.
She probed the leg knowledgeably, made him flex it.
“It’s going to swell,” she said. “I should have gone to the drug store and gotten you an Ace bandage. What did you do to it,
anyway?”
“I fell off a rope,” he said. “There’s an Ace bandage in the bathroom.”
“Have you got some kind of liniment?”
“A bottle of Sloane’s,” he said.
She went back into the bathroom and returned with the liniment and the bandage. She rubbed the liniment in, and then wrapped the knee with the bandage.
“If it’s badly swollen in the morning, you’d better see a doctor,” she said.
“How much time did you say you had?” he asked.
“I was afraid you’d never ask,” she said. With her eyes meeting his, she stood up and pulled her sweater off over her head.
XII
(One)
Headquarters, JFK Center for Special Warfare
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
1440 Hours, 21 June 1969
The conference table was stacked high with paper, and four desks with IBM typewriters had been set up. They were manned by muscular young Green Berets who looked as if they would be far happier throwing the typewriters around like basketballs.
“May I have your attention, gentlemen?” Colonel Craig Lowell called out.
The others at the conference table—the senior of whom was General Hanrahan—looked up from the stacks of paper with a mixture of annoyance and curiosity.
“I have a military profundity to utter,” Lowell announced solemnly. “Napoleon was wrong. Armies don’t travel on their stomachs. They slide along on paper.”
It was a bad joke in any circumstances. It was not appreciated now.
“Jesus Christ, Duke!” General Hanrahan said, impatiently.
“I little stir crazy, Craig?” Sandy Felter said.
“An understatement,” Lowell said. “I have been here seven long, long hours.”
“Jesus,” General Hanrahan said. “Has it been that long?”
“You will recall, General, I’m sure,” Lowell said, “from the foggy recesses of fond memory, that we fought a whole goddamned Greek division with less paper than this.”
The Generals Page 27
