Reign in Hell

by William Diehl

  “It’s ironic that Lawrence Pennington is the President of the United States and Engstrom is the leader of one of the most dangerous hate groups in the country,” Castaigne said.

  “Why is it ironic?” Vail asked.

  “Because Engstrom hated Pennington, and Pennington didn’t even know Engstrom existed.”

  And Castaigne told him the story.

  CHAPTER 9

  NEAR KHE SANH, SOUTH VIETNAM, JANUARY 31, 1968

  On the first night of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year holiday, the North Vietnamese celebrated by launching a massive attack on American and South Vietnamese troops. Eighty-five thousand Viet-cong swarmed over the country, with another 85,000 in the backup force.

  “Charlie Company, this is Fox, do you copy?”

  “Copy that, Fox.”

  “This is Colonel Walker, get me Colonel Pennington on the double.”

  “He’s right here, sir.”

  The radioman handed the set to Pennington, who was crouched along the edge of a rice paddy. Occasionally a mortar round would erupt, showering his troops with mud and water. He was tired and his force was splintered. He had not changed his wet socks or clothes for two days. It was getting dark.

  “Pennington here.”

  “Larry, it’s Lou Whitaker. What’s your position?”

  “We’re about fifteen miles north of Khe Sanh. My troops are scattered all over hell and gone. What the hell’s going on?”

  “We got Cong up our ass and out our ears. We’re under attack all over the damn country. A suicide squadron blew a hole in the embassy wall last night and invaded the inner perimeter. It took the MPs five hours to kill ’em all.”

  “Christ, where are they all coming from?”

  “Who the hell knows? The word is out they took Hue over on the coast, and we’re under siege here in Saigon. And buddy, you’ve got about ten thousand of ’em coming down the pike toward Khe Sanh.”

  “What d’ya mean, coming down, they’re all over the place.”

  “Larry, you’ve got to set up a line and hit these bastards before they get to the city. We got five thousand Marines in there trying to hold the town, and they’re already outnumbered five to one.”

  “Who isn’t! What the hell do you want us to do, Lou, go looking for them?”

  “That would help.”

  “Jesus, my people are dog tired. We’re burned out.”

  “Who isn’t? Do your best, buddy.”

  Pennington and his radioman ran back along the paddy wall, dodging sniper fire and mortars. He had lost his captain and two lieutenants the night before. For an hour he worked with Cobb, his first sergeant, to regroup his force.

  “When we find the VC’s reinforcement column, we’re going to attack,” he told Cobb.

  “What the fuck with, sir? We’re running outta ammo, outta grenades. We already ran outta light.”

  “I don’t give a goddamn, Cobbie. Shoot ’em, stab ’em, kick ’em, bite ’em. Pass the word I want to hear rebel yells, I want to hear football cheers. If we can’t do anything else, we’ll scare the bastards to death.” Two hours later Pennington and Cobb led the company into a wooded bay, and suddenly a face appeared through the darkness just a few feet from Pennington. They were nose-to-nose with the enemy. Pennington raised his pistol and shot his adversary in the eye. The woods erupted with gunfire. A chaotic hand-to-hand battle broke out. Pennington charged ahead, firing with his .45. He felt a bite at his shoulder, another in his side, and still kept going, slashing blindly with his knife, using the .45 as a club. Flashes of gunfire blinked in the darkness like fireflies. Men were screaming.

  Behind him someone fired a flare, and the battlefield suddenly burst into garish red light. Pennington got a momentary glimpse of his surroundings. He and Cobb were twenty yards ahead of his main force, caught in a no-man’s-land between the Americans and the Viet-cong, his men pinned down.

  “Get off your asses, goddamn it!” Pennington roared. “Get out here. And let’s hear some goddamn yelling!”

  He and Cobb turned and charged toward the enemy. His men ran forward into the darkness. Beside him, Cobb grunted. “Jesus,” he yelled, and fell to his knees. Pennington jumped to his side as several riflemen raced past them, firing blindly into the dark and yelling like banshees.

  The sergeant’s fist was jammed in a bloody hole in his side.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” Pennington yelled above the din.

  “Where are we going?” Cobb moaned.

  “How about Boston, Cobbie? Want to go to Boston?”

  “Don’t make me laugh, it hurts too bad.”

  Pennington swung Cobb to a sitting position, swept him over his shoulder and started back to the edge of the forest. A bullet ripped into his thigh, and as he fell, a half-dozen men swarmed around them.

  “You okay, Colonel?” a friendly voice said.

  “Thank God it’s you guys,” Pennington said. “I didn’t know where the hell I was. We got a medic handy? I think I’m bleeding to death.”

  “Right here, sir. I’ll just tie that right up for you.”

  “How’s Cobb?” Pennington asked.

  “Touch and go, Colonel.”

  “Take care of him, you hear? Don’t worry about me, just take care of him.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Behind him he could hear the yelling and gunfire fading.

  “Anybody know what the hell’s going on?”

  “I think the gooks split for Hanoi,” the medic said with a smile. “We got ’em on the run.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “My feelings exactly, Colonel.”

  At dawn the medevacs swept in and took the wounded back to Saigon. Cobb was on the first chopper out. Pennington left last. As the chopper lifted off, Pennington looked down at the battlefield. The land below was littered with dead. Vultures were already gathering.

  A hundred miles away on the same night, Captain Joshua Engstrom and three men lurked on the edge of a river in the Delta. Their faces were painted white and they were stripped down to just their shorts. Engstrom tightened a belt around his waist and checked the waterproof pouch attached to it. The pouch contained a .45 caliber automatic with five clips and a map. He had a knife sheath taped to his right thigh and another hanging from his belt. His men were doing the same, checking their equipment, peering upriver.

  On the opposite side of the river, Black Bobby Shrack was crouched in a blind with a sniper rifle. He saw Engstrom’s shielded flashlight blink twice and returned the signal. They were ready. He turned his binoculars upriver, saw a speck of light, and fixed on it.

  They had rehearsed the operation several times. Preacher was a stickler for rehearsing. Rehearsing and timing, rehearsing and timing. Nobody spoke. They moved quickly, almost like machines, using hand signals to converse. Hidden a dozen feet away, on Engstrom’s side of the river, was a second sniper, a slender man with a black beard and long hair. He snapped his fingers and pointed upriver.

  Faintly they heard laughter and the jabber of voices. The men spread out and waited. The boat appeared through the dark and headed toward them. It was a wide, flat-bottom skiff with twin engines on the back.

  Engstrom drew his knife. Half aloud he said, “And the Lord sayeth to Joshua, go thee and drive out the Semites and Canaanites and slay them and send them back whence they came. And Joshua went forth to do His bidding.”

  He put the knife between his teeth and slid quietly into the water.

  There were five men on the wide skiff, two sitting on barrels near the bow smoking cigarettes, peering at two fingers of light from spotlights attached to the bow. The other three were bunched together near the center of the boat under a lantern, leafing through a dog-eared copy of Playboy. All five wore the uniforms of North Vietnamese soldiers. The deck was covered with oilskin packages, stacked three deep.

  The crewmen did not hear Engstrom and his team catch the side of the boat as it muttered by or hear them crawl silently over the ste
rn.

  The team crept up to them like cats. Each of the team members positioned himself behind one of the three readers.

  The two shots were barely audible. One of the men in the front of the boat flipped over backward, sending the barrel spinning against the rail. The other one stood up, turned slowly, and fell over the side.

  The team attacked swiftly, each grabbing a target by the hair, snapping his head back, and slitting his throat. They were deep cuts, almost to the spine. Engstrom held tight to his victim as the man jerked violently in the throes of death. Air hissed from his windpipe and sprayed a fine mist of blood into the air. When the man stopped jerking, Engstrom let him fall to the deck.

  “Clear,” he said. He cut the engines, and another member of the team tossed a bowline to the bearded sniper, who tied the skiff to a tree. Bloody knives flashed in the lantern light as the team slit open each package and dumped the contents over the side. Engstrom watched the brown crystals of heroin swirl and disappear. The bearded sniper hunched on the shore, watching the river. When the rest of the team had destroyed the entire load, he unlashed the boat. Then Engstrom cranked up the engines and turned it around and headed it back up river.

  Metzinger tied down the wheel.

  Engstrom leaned over his victim, who was lying facedown on the deck, and pulled back his head. His muscles bulged as he neatly sliced the heavy blade through the man’s neck bone. He tied the bloody head by its hair to the radio antenna.

  “Therefore David ran,” he bellowed, looking up the river, “stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof and cut off his head therewith. And when the Philistines saw their champion was dead, they fled. First Samuel, Chapter Seventeen.”

  He turned, jumped overboard, and swam to shore. He stuck his knife in a tree stump and stood waist deep in the river, washing the blood from his arms and hands for a very long time.

  The story of Pennington in Vietnam became legendary. It was the kind of story the Army loves and the media turns into legend; the kind of story that wins soldiers the Medal of Honor.

  Engstrom was the army’s secret weapon, commanding the Phantom Project with its Specter squads operating deep in Vietcong territory, all trained experts at guerrilla warfare, torture, assassination, explosives, their methods so excessive all records of the project were sealed after the war—or destroyed.

  Pennington came home from Vietnam to parades, a general’s star, and a Medal of Honor. Engstrom came back a major who couldn’t even talk about his exploits in the war.

  ***

  Lawrence Culver Pennington and Joshua Luke Engstrom were inducted into the Army on the same day, August 23, 1952. Seventeen years old and fired with patriotism, both had enlisted rather than waiting to be drafted, anxious to see action in Korea. Engstrom, the son of a Wyoming fundamentalist preacher, was an unsophisticated mountain boy who had barely slipped by in high school. Pennington was an Arlington, Virginia, high school ROTC honor graduate whose father was a career diplomat.

  One night during basic training, Pennington noticed the lean young westerner sitting alone on the steps of the PX. He sat down next to him, shook a Chesterfield loose, and offered it to him.

  “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” Engstrom said.

  “Homesick already?” Pennington asked as he lit the cigarette.

  “Nope. Just never was anyplace this hot before.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Dexter, Wyoming.”

  Pennington whistled. “You are a long way from home. I’m Larry Pennington, Arlington, Virginia,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Josh Engstrom.”

  “You a cowboy?” Pennington asked cheerfully.

  “Nah,” Engstrom said. “Can’t even ride a horse. But I delivered papers on a bicycle.”

  “I sold Saturday Evening Post subscriptions door-to-door one summer trying to earn enough points to earn a bike. What a cheat that was. What do you want to get into?”

  “Tank Corps,” Engstrom said.

  “Tank jockey, huh. That’s tough duty.”

  “I used to dream about driving a tank,” Engstrom said, staring up at the stars. “Like Patton. After this war’s over I want to stay in the Army.”

  “Career soldier, huh? Me, too.”

  “I want to be an officer.” Engstrom looked at Pennington and smiled shyly. “I’d like to be a general someday.”

  “Nothing wrong with dreaming,” Pennington said. “I want to be Chief of Staff someday.”

  They both laughed. They never saw each other again after that night.

  Engstrom made it to the Tank Corps. Pennington went to Officer’s Training School. After the Korean War, Engstrom was reassigned for retraining, and for the next few years he was just another shavetail lost in the reorganization of the postwar Army. Pennington was appointed to West Point, graduated with honors, and started up the military ladder. He was the kind of officer the Army dreams about: smart, charming, polished, diplomatic, a brilliant strategist, and socially acceptable.

  Over the years, Engstrom languished in obscure Army bases, frozen in rank as a lieutenant, while Pennington rose steadily to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Sometime in the early sixties, just before they both went to Vietnam, Engstrom fixated on Pennington, remembering that night in southern Georgia. He grumbled constantly that he was a better field officer than Pennington but was passed over because he was a country boy whose outspoken religious beliefs made him socially unacceptable to the Army hierarchy. There was a modicum of truth to that. But records also show there were complaints that Engstrom was a bigot who purged his units of blacks, Jews, and Catholics, read the Bible aloud during training sessions, and objected to his troops drinking liquor and smoking. In Vietnam, the Army found the perfect place for both of them.

  Years later on the eve of their respective retirements, both officers served in Saudi Arabia. Pennington was regaled by the media as one of the master strategists of Desert Storm. Engstrom earned a single photograph in the New York Times as the “Preacher,” a tough colonel who led his men into battle with a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other.

  And a year later, when Pennington retired as Army Chief of Staff, an embittered Engstrom was retired in rank. He never earned his star.

  Engstrom blamed Pennington for blocking his promotion to general when he retired. The irony was that Pennington had nothing to do with it. He didn’t remember Engstrom.

  He didn’t even know who Engstrom was.

  CHAPTER 10

  “So Pennington trades his war years for a ticket to the White House and Engstrom plans the second American Revolution,” Vail said.

  “That’s right,” Castaigne replied. “Engstrom has built a private army in Montana. He got his star as adjutant general of the Montana National Guard, stayed just long enough to build a following and shanghai the best officers into his private army, resigned, and founded the Church of the Sanctuary of the Lord and the Wrath of God. Next he brought in old cronies from ’Nam and Desert Storm, enlisted members of the Klan, the Posse, and the Covenant of the Sword to become officers in the Army of the Sanctuary. When he resigned as adjutant general, the Sanctuary was already established as an umbrella for four churches. The preachers of the four churches are hardened veterans from Vietnam and Desert Storm.

  “He envisioned an army disguised as a church that would eventually mobilize the other militias into a countrywide revolutionary force.”

  “With himself as its Paul Revere,” Vail said.

  “Yep. The architect of what Engstrom calls the New Revolution. He defined its mission, he directs its strategy, and he’s its most effective recruiter.”

  “And the FBI ignored him all that time?”

  “They put a loose package on him, but they have budget problems just like everybody else, Martin. Hard surveillance costs money. And Engstrom wasn’t considered a threat. He went on a speaking tour, and his message was against gun control and income taxes, spiced with evangelic
al fervor. No big deal. The Bureau didn’t start worrying until he started weaving in government conspiracies, attacks on the Jews, and open rebellion against the government. By then he had proselytized fanatics into the four churches that were the nucleus of the Sanctuary. Each of the churches had become a unit in his private army. Klansmen from Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi moved to Montana to become part of the army.

  “Then last month Engstrom started a radio show called The Wrath of Abraham.’ It started as an hour show once a week. Abraham was an extremist, and controversial from the git-go. His message is a mix of hate and borderline sedition, delivered with the kind of fervor that makes Engstrom sound like a Boy Scout. The show caught on overnight. It’s now running five times a week, thirty minutes a night, and is syndicated in about thirty markets, mostly in the Far West and the South. The audience is estimated at four to five million.”

  “And Abraham’s rage is…”

  “Taxes, gun control, gays, abortion, Jews, blacks, reds, yellows, His-panics… everything but white Christian bigots. He openly preaches violence, advocates killing government employees like Forest Rangers and office workers. In just six months, he’s become the national voice of the militia movement. The radio show is sponsored by the Sanctuary. Engstrom introduces it.”

  “So now the Bureau and the DOJ are real serious, right?”

  She nodded. “But by the time the FBI started paying attention, Engstrom’s army had grown to between five and six thousand active militiamen. They train every weekend in their hometowns and once a month at Fort Yahweh—”

  “Fort what?”

  Hines punched a few keys and a video popped on the screen, a helicopter shot of what appeared to be a military compound.

  “Yahweh. It’s a distortion of the Hebrew word for God in the Bible. This is it, a ninety-thousand-acre compound in the Rockies north of Missoula. The homes and farms of hard-core members were deeded to the Sanctuary to beat taxes. Fort Yahweh is now the size of a small town. It’s an armed military compound.”