to walk back down again;
when the fight was over--
and Old Glory raised
Among the men who held it high
was the Indian--Ira Hayes.
Ira Hayes returned a hero--
celebrated through the land,
He was wined and speeched and honored--
everybody shook his hand;
But he was just a Pima Indian--
no water, no home, no chance;
At home nobody cared what Ira'd done--
and when do the Indians dance?
Then Ira started drinkin' hard--
jail was often his home;
They let him raise the flag and lower it--
as you would throw a dog a bone;
He died drunk early one morning--
alone in the land he'd fought to save;
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch--
was the grave for Ira Hayes.
Yea, call him drunken Ira Hayes,
but his land is just as dry,
and the ghost is lying thirsty
in the ditch where Ira died."
After that, I walked over to the musician. His hands were half paw, and his ears and eyes were still wolfen. He was about six foot, a white guy, with long black curly hair. I opened my mouth to ask him if he knew anything a little more upbeat, and he just stared right through me as if I wasn't there and started in on "Johnny what have they done to ye?"
Another guy came up and shook his head at me saying "Don't do no good to talk to Bobby none. He don't talk, just sings them damn songs. When he's down, it's stuff like this. When he's up it's even worse, 'The Ballad of the Green Berets', 'Roger Young', 'The Sinking of the Bismarck' and stuff like that. Momma Osborn's son never really came home from Chosen. But damn it, what are you gonna do? He got the Silver Star and the Navy Cross from the Corps, and if they knew what he really was, they probably would a shot 'im. Bastards." All of this was spoken flat and deadpan. This guy was a good bit smaller than me, and smelled sort of like a ferret. I wasn't sure what he was for a moment, and then I saw some markings in his black and gray hair as he held out his paw. Markings that are really familiar if you've ever seen them. This guy was a wolverine. Shit! He was also black as the ace of spades. He offered me his hand, saying "Amos Moses Brown, once of the First of the Twenty-Eighth."
"How are you?" I asked as I took his hand "John Fisher, USN. My last command was SEAL Team Twelve."
"SEAL Team Twelve? We got someone else from your unit on watch. They only had two of them when I was in."
"Yeah they didn't stand up twelve until 1971, and it wasn't called that then. I think they called it Developmental Group Two. They didn't make it TEAM Twelve until 1977 when they did away with the UDT teams and made everyone a SEAL. Then they made TEAMS Three-Eight, and TEAM Twelve."
"What happened to Teams Nine through Eleven?" asked Amos.
"I don't know. So what was the First of the Twenty-Eighth?" Come to think of it, I had always wondered about that. Why did they make us TEAM Twelve, not TEAM Nine? Oh well...
"Oh, mostly it was straight leg infantry. We spent a lot of time in the Chu Chi district."
"Chu Chi district, now why do I know that name?" I mused.
"Got me by the balls!" muttered Amos. "Say, wait a minute. You say your team used to be called Dev Gru two?"
"Well that's what they taught in BUDSL."
"Wasn't that the Experimental unit that allowed us freaks?"
"Yeah, it was stood up shortly after they passed the Civil Rights bills. The Military was all fired up to find out if 'Thropes and such would be viable as a military unit on a larger scale than had been tried before."
Amos nodded, and thought a moment. "They were just talking about that when I got out. How did it work? I never asked Cadillac, he's a bit messed up."
"Well enough that the Powers That Be decided to make us a permanent part of the Navy. The army has something similar. The Corps integrated us into the normal Recon Platoons. The Chair Force mainly uses Vamps, and then only for night fighters and CSAR."
Amos nodded, pursed his lips, then turned to walk away. That was when I noticed a tat on his right arm. It was a rat snarling out at the world. In his right hand he held a pistol, in his left a flashlight. Underneath was the motto "Non gratum anus rodentum". That was when it dawned on me where I had heard of the Chu Chi district. This guy had been a Tunnel Rat. Holy shit. Those guys were probably the bravest muthafuckers in the war. If you have never heard of them, look them up, I can't do them justice. But I must say it's the perfect place for a wolverine. I had to know though "So, did the Army find out you were a 'Thrope and make you a 'Rat' or what?"
"Nope, wasn't a 'Thrope when I started." He turned back to me and grinned. "The doc figured that someone else had been a 'Thrope, and had wounded but not killed a VC. I had the bad luck to come up against him later. I barely escaped, and the only reason I managed it was that I always carried a cane knife with me. I had shot the guy 'till I was empty, and he just kept coming. He was bitin' and scratchin' me up bad when I upped with that cane knife and chopped his fuckin' head off. Now Wolverines aren't exactly native to Vietnam, so he must have caught it from someone else."
Wow. I just couldn't imagine facing a 'Thrope Wolverine in a pitch black tunnel with a knife. And not a silver knife either, I would guess. "Remind me never to piss you off." I said, looking at him in awe.
He just shrugged and said "Don't signify" and walked away. Not sure what that means, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to know. Time to go find me a place to lay my head. Bobby started singing a song called "Ruby".
Chapter Fourteen
Well, after meeting Amos, I was almost willing to let the FPI try to take these guys in. Just to watch the fun as these old dudes handed the FPI their heads, mind you...
I went over in the direction that Teador had pointed as the kitchen to get some stuff out of the "lucky bag". That's what we used to call the lost and found/abandoned clothing storage locker back in the Navy. I'm not sure of the origin of the phrase, maybe it's because if you find your shit in it, you were damn lucky. But I digress. There was a lot of various stuff in the bag, and I found several things that would fit. Wool shirts and jeans mostly. There was underwear in there too, but thank gods I didn't need to use anyone else's skivvies. Yuck. I grabbed up a few changes of clothes and asked the apparent cook where an empty flop was.
This guy wasn't one of the ones I had seen out front. He was a little guy, Hispanic, about five foot five. Ninety-eight pounds or so. Eyes were pure black, and had a bit of a snout. He was a Wererat. I recognized the type even before I smelled him. We had several of them in the Teams, they were great for moving quietly and getting into places you would never think a man could go. The sort of stuff that we used to do a lot. He had an anchor tattooed on his arm, so I had to ask...
"Hi, I'm John Fisher. I see the anchor, were you in the Teams?" I asked as I held out a hand.
The guy looked at me with a puzzled look on his face, and said "Teams? What teams? I'm Jose Gutierrez. Glad to meet you, but I don't know nothing about teams. I was in the Navy. Me and a couple of my compadres, we were Seabees in Korea. We got bit at a place called Inchon. It got pretty bad there for a while."
I had read about the landings at Inchon. It was a required part of the curriculum for SEALS, even though it was before there was a SEAL. Some of the old Frogs (that was what they used to call the UDT or Underwater Demolition Teams, the SEALs forerunner unit, and the origin of the title 'bullfrog' for the senior enlisted man in a Team) had been involved heavily. The North Korean Army realized too late that they were being invaded one hundred miles behind the lines, at a landing zone believed to be impossible to conduct amphibious operations on. When they figured out that they had been had, they threw everything they had at the beachhead, in the hopes of driving the Marines and Navy back into the sea.
I offered my hand again, saying "Jose, if you were at Inchon, you were in the Teams,
you just didn't know it."
Jose took my hand and shook it. He had a good grip for a little guy. He looked up at me and smiled a toothy grin. "So, what are these teams I was in?"
Well, I explained about the SEAL teams, and how they had originated from the UDT. We talked Navy shop for about a half hour or so, then a couple more rats came in. It turns out that there are three of them in this group, all from the same Sea-Bee unit, all from the same little town in Texas. They had grown up together, learned the construction trade together, joined the Navy together at the end of World War II, gone through the training and then the war had ended.
They were in the Reserves when the shit hit the fan in Korea, and had all been called up to the same unit. That unit had been trying to build a causeway to the mainland when the counter-attack came, and they ended up fighting from their 'dozers and backhoes. All three of them had been bitten or scratched by the same NKA commando while they were trying to take the guy out. They ended up taking him apart with machetes, which used to be part of the uniform for the Construction Battalions. Well, at the time they needed guys bad enough that they let them stay in. Then after the war, they were medically discharged on a fake diagnosis. If the Navy had been honest about it, they would have given a diagnosis of Battle Fatigue. These guys had the twitch worse than anyone I had ever seen. Someone dropped a pot in the sink behind us while we were talking, and I thought these three were going to drop under the table. One of them, Roberto, half changed before he caught himself.
After our nice long talk about the bad old days, Roberto said that he would show me where to bunk down. Jose apologized that he couldn't do it, but he had to get supper on. Roberto said that he would be happy to do it; it would give him something to do.
We walked down a tunnel that came off of the same end of the large cavern where the kitchen was, and soon found several openings with curtains across them. This place was a regular rabbit warren. I don't know how much was original mine, how much was natural and how much had been done by the group over the years, but damn, it was extensive. After a few with curtains we found an opening without curtains across it. Roberto gestured me in, saying "Here you are amigo, home sweet home." Just inside there was a lamp pull, and it even worked. The furnishings were minimal. A cot, a foot locker, a chair, and a rug. The room looked like it was either a store room when this was a working mine or they had carved it out. But hey, it beat living on the street, which is what some of these guys would have been doing otherwise. Roberto left me to my own devices and said that he would see me later.
I pulled the curtain that was back up out of the way across the front and set all my stuff down on the bed. I was going to start figuring out what could and couldn't be seen, when I heard the sound of footsteps coming my way. I quickly pulled the blanket on the cot over the stuff and turned just in time to see Sean pull my curtain back. He had a sneer on his face, or at least I think it was a sneer, in a face that was half wolf, it's sort of hard to tell the difference between a sneer and a snarl. He looked in at me and commented "You may have Yoshi and Teador fooled, but you don't have all of us buffaloed, cat. I'm watching you, and so is the rest of my Pack. I don't know what your game is, but I will find out. So watch yourself."
I looked back at him and asked mildly "Don't you know how to knock? I know Chihuahua's that can be taught that much."
"Yeah, I bet you know Chihuahua's, I saw that you wasted no time hanging out with the other prey species around here...If you're going to find allies, you might want to find someone better than rats."
"You know Sean, you keep this up, I might have to move you up from PTSD victim, to nuisance. Don't make me consider you a nuisance. Those prey species guys probably saw more shit, and with less advantages in training and gear, than you ever did. As to prey species, we had several rats in our Team, better sneak and peek artists you never saw. Fine saboteurs too." This guy was starting to get on my nerves.
"Oh yeah, I forgot. You SEALs primarily do that sabotage shit, nothing like a real stand up fight." The contempt in his voice came through just fine, even with a partial muzzle.
"Shithead, when did you come in the army?" I had a theory...let's go fishing...
"1971, whazit to you?"
"Uh-uh. Were you already changed?"
"Yeah. My buddy brought me over, right after it became legal to be a wolf...ain't it cool?"
"Uh huh." I said with a droll voice "And let me guess. You saw the movie 'Green Berets'?"
"Only ten or twelve times." he said with pride in his voice.
"Yep, that's what I figured. The pilots had the same sort of problem after 'Top Gun' and we had the same sort of problem after that piece of shit flick 'Navy Seals'. Tell me, how many people did you kill in 'Nam?"
"Thirty-five, for sure, and about a dozen more possibles!" he said with pride.
"Uh-huh, and how long were you in country and how long were you in the service?" Yes, I was leading the witness. This wasn't a court of law, and I was setting this prick up on purpose.
"I was in country for fourteen months. I did four years and they discharged me, I guess they didn't want wolves in the piece of shit peace time army." He sounded a little defensive at that.
"That's a load of horseshit and you know it. I served with wolves more than any other critter. Primarily because there's more of you than anyone else. You're a problem looking for a place to happen! You're a fucking glory hound in an outfit that has no place for them. In case you're too stupid to figure it out, 'The Green Berets' was a fucking movie. I come second to no man in my love for John Wayne, but it was a movie, asshole! The Special Ops community isn't about glory. It isn't about a fair fight. Warfare isn't about a fair fight. It also isn't about how many of the enemy you kill." That was as far as I got before he interrupted me.
"Well sure, you would say that, how many notches on your gun, huh? None I bet, you were peace time." This last said with the condescending tone usually reserved for starters talking to third-string JV players in high school sports.
"You really don't have a clue, do you? Let's start from the beginning. Those Rats you were disrespecting? They joined the Navy as Sea Bees. They weren't 'Thropes when they joined. They fought off a Wererat hand to hand, and killed him at a place called Inchon during one of the most fucked up amphibious invasions in history. It ranked right alongside Anzio, which you also probably never heard of. Now think about that for a second, three humans with knives against a trained lycanthrope, in the middle of a battle, and then going through all of the aftermath of the infection and the change during combat, while still doing your job.
"Dude, you ain't fit to lick their feet. And as for me and my peace time service, I did twenty years. Eight of those on a Special Operations Submarine, doing shit that I will never be able to tell anyone about. Then I got infected, and wound up as a SEAL, doing more shit that I will never be able to tell anyone about. Just during the several police actions we were at, I know I killed more than thirty or forty. Most of them with my bare hands, or claws and teeth. That doesn't count those that we killed in places we never were, doing things we never did. I didn't count. I have no idea how many people I killed, and I don't want to know. Listen to me, you-pumped up little puppy, war isn't about killing people. It's about making governments do what you want them to do. Sometimes that involves killing people. Sometimes it involves killing LOTS of people. Other times it involves just making them so fucking pee-their-pants-scared, they'll do what you demand so that you will go away. Now get out of my face, or challenge me and be done with it." I don't often let people get under my skin. This one was managing it though.
He didn't say a word, he just turned and left. I had no doubt that I was not done with him yet. If there was anything I had learned over the years, it was never to underestimate the power of human stupidity. It was virtually inevitable that he and I were going to have to go to blows over this. But I would worry about that later. Right now, I needed to get the stuff that shouldn't be seen under cover.
> I made sure that Sean had gone away for the moment, and then went through my stuff. The only clothing I had packed was that high tech jump suit uniform thing that they had come up with for us shape shifters. Sure enough, that had "Park Police" all over it. A good thing if you're in a raid, a bad thing if you're undercover. So, to the bottom of the foot locker it went. My load-bearing vest had drop down panels that said "Police" as well, so it went in the locker too. Nobody but Yoshi has seen this stuff in any detail, and he sort of knew the score. I hadn't told him everything, but I told him enough. The Blackberry was safe enough, if they didn't have some serious mad hacker skills they weren't going to get anything from it. The radio, of course, had to go in. Then on top of the incriminating stuff went the clothes I had gotten out of the lucky bag. Except for one set which I put on, and the boots, which I also put on. They weren't perfect, but they would do, and the floor of this place was stone, hence COLD.
Once I got everything in the locker, it was time for a little hoodoo. Mary, being a Shaman type, was good with nature stuff, and I could do a little of that sort of thing. Where I really turned out to have a knack though was with manufactured items. If it had been modified by man once, I could make it sit up and beg. Now, none of this was super fast, I couldn't weld a bad guy's gun into a block of iron before he could pull the trigger or anything (oh how I wish!). But I could make this foot locker's metal one solid piece with a couple of words, the passing of my hands over the joints that I wanted to "weld", and a little bit of iron. The tip of my knife worked nicely. Didn't remove any of the metal on the knife either, it just acts sort of as a catalyst. When I got done, the edge of the lid and the edge of the box were effectively one piece of metal. And would remain so, until I removed the spell, or someone cut it with a torch or a long time with a saw. Oh, someone could still smash through the wood, if they wanted in bad enough, but that would take some doing too, and was sure to cause someone to come and find out what the Hel was going on.
Then it was time to make my door secure. I had to think about this for a few moments, and what I finally came up with was brilliant, if I do say so myself. There's a sort of spell called a cantrip. They're simple, throw away spells that even the most basic talent can use. Hel, there are guys with virtually NO talent that can pull these off. I used a couple of these. One is untie. It unties knots. It also works on shoelaces. Another one is tangle. It works on anything that can tangle, hair, shoelaces...Grow is also useful, it works on hair as a cantrip, and to a limited extent works on plants and such. (That's not what Mary used on the brambles when she tied up the helicopter at the island, what she used had a lot more force to it.) Trip is another good one. It will not make you fall, per se, just stumble. But if your shoelaces are untied and tangled together, or the hair on your feet is suddenly ten inches long and tangled together, it's enough to put you on your face.
Keeping The Faith (John Fisher Chronicles Book 2) Page 16
