by Tom Clancy
There were compensations, if you could call them that. The Vietnamese soldiers treated him with respect, almost awe—except for the camp commander, Major Vinh, worthless bastard that he was. Courtesy to a fellow socialist ally demanded that Grishanov be given an orderly, in this case a small, ignorant peasant boy with only one eye who was able to make the bed and carry out the slops bowl every morning. The Colonel was able to walk out in the knowledge that his room would be somewhat tidy when he returned. And he had his work. Important, professionally stimulating. But he would have killed for his morning Sovietskiy Sport.
“Good morning, Ivan,” Kelly whispered to himself. He didn’t even need the binoculars for that. The size was so different—the man was over six feet—and the uniform far neater than that worn by the NVA. The glasses showed Kelly the man’s face, pale with a narrowed-eye expression to contemplate the day. He made a gesture to a small private who’d been waiting outside the door of the officers’ quarters. Orderly, Kelly thought. A visiting Russian colonel would like his comforts, wouldn’t he? Definitely a pilot from the wings over the blouse pocket, plenty of ribbons. Only one? Kelly wondered. Only one Russian officer to help torture the prisoners? Odd when you think about it. But that meant only one extraneous person to have to kill, and for all his lack of political sophistication, Kelly knew that killing Russians wouldn’t do anyone much good. He watched the Russian walk across the parade ground. Then the senior visible Vietnamese officer, a major, went towards him. Another limper, Kelly saw. The little Major saluted the tall Colonel.
“Good morning, Comrade Colonel.”
“Good morning, Major Vinh.” Little bastard can’t even learn to salute properly. Perhaps he simply cannot make a proper gesture to his betters. “The rations for the prisoners?”
“They will have to be satisfied with what they have,” the smaller man replied in badly accented and phrased Russian.
“Major, it is important that you understand me,” Grishanov said, stepping closer so that he could look more sharply down at the Vietnamese. “I need the information they have. I cannot get it if they are too sick to speak.”
“Tovarich, we have problems enough feeding our own people. You ask us to waste good food on murderers?” The Vietnamese soldier responded quietly, using a tone that both conveyed his contempt for the foreigner and at the same time seemed respectful to his soldiers, who would not have understood exactly what this was all about. After all, they thought that the Russians were fast allies.
“Your people do not have what my country needs, Major. And if my country gets what she needs, then your country might get more of what it needs.
“I have my orders. If you are experiencing difficulty in questioning the Americans, then I am prepared to help.” Arrogant dog. It was a suffix that didn’t need to be spoken, and Vinh knew how to stick his needle into a sensitive place.
“Thank you, Major. That will not be necessary.” Grishanov made a salute himself, even sloppier than that given him by this annoying little man. It would be good to watch him die, the Russian thought, walking off to the prison block. His first “appointment” with the day was with an American naval aviator who was just about ready to crack.
Casual enough, Kelly thought from several hundred yards away. Those two must get along fairly well. His scrutiny of the camp was relaxed now. His greatest fear was that the guard force might send out security patrols, as a line unit in hostile country would surely have done. But they were not in hostile territory, and this was not really a line unit. His next radio message to Ogden confirmed that everything was within acceptable risk limits.
Sergeant Peter Meyer smoked. His father didn’t approve, but accepted his son’s weakness so long as he did it outside, as they were now, on the back porch of the parsonage after Sunday evening dinner.
“It’s Doris Brown, right?” Peter asked. At twenty-six he was one of his department’s youngest sergeants, and like most of the current class of police officers a Vietnam veteran. He was within six credit hours of completing his night-school degree and was considering making an application to the FBI Academy. Word that the wayward girl had returned was now circulating through the neighborhood. “I remember her. She had a reputation as a hot number a few years back.”
“Peter, you know I can’t say. This is a pastoral matter. I will counsel the person to speak to you when the time is right, but—”
“Pop, I understand the law on that, okay? You have to understand, we’re talking two homicides here. Two dead people, plus the drug business.” He flipped the butt of his Salem into the grass. “That’s pretty heavy stuff, Pop.”
“Even worse than that,” his father reported more quietly still. “They don’t just kill the girls. Torture, sexual abuse. It’s pretty horrible. The person is seeing a doctor about it. I know I have to do something, but I can’t—”
“Yeah, I know you can’t. Okay, I can call the people in Baltimore and fill them in on what you’ve told me. I really ought to hold off until we can give them something they can really use, but, well, like you say, we have to do something. I’ll call down first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Will it put her—the person—in danger?” the Reverend Meyer asked, vexed with himself for the slip.
“Shouldn’t,” Peter judged. “If she’s gotten herself away—I mean, they ought not to know where she is, and if they did, they might have got her already.”
“How can people do things like that?”
Peter lit up another. His father was just too good a man to understand. Not that he did either. “Pop, I see it all the time, and I have trouble believing it, too. The important part’s getting the bastards.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
The KGB rezident in Hanoi had General-Major rank, and his job was mainly that of spying on his country’s putative allies. What were their real objectives? Was their supposed estrangement with China real or a sham? Would they cooperate with the Soviet Union when and if the war came to a successful conclusion? Might they allow the Soviet Navy use of a base after the Americans left? Was their political determination really as solid as they said it was? Those were all questions whose answers he thought he had, but orders from Moscow and his own skepticism about everyone and everything compelled him to keep asking. He employed agents within the CPVN, the country’s Foreign Ministry, and elsewhere, Vietnamese whose willingness to give information to an ally would probably have meant death—though to be politic about it, the deaths would be disguised “suicides” or “accidents” because it was in neither country’s interest to have a formal breach. Lip-service was even more important in a socialist country than a capitalist one, the General knew, because symbols were far easier to produce than reality.
The enciphered dispatch on his desk was interesting, all the more so since it did not give him direct guidance on what to do about it. How like the Moscow bureaucrats! Always quick to meddle in matters that he was able to handle himself, now they didn’t know what to do—but they were afraid to do nothing. So they stuck him with it.
He knew about the camp, of course. Though he ran a military-intelligence operation, he had people in the office of the attaché who reported to him as well. The KGB watched everyone, after all; that was their job. Colonel Grishanov was using irregular methods, but he was reporting good results, better than the General’s own office got from these little savages. Now the Colonel had come up with the boldest idea of all. Instead of letting the Vietnamese kill the prisoners in due course, bring them home to Mother Russia. It was brilliant in its way, and the KGB general was trying to decide if he’d endorse the idea to Moscow, where this decision would surely be kicked up to ministerial, or perhaps even Politburo level. On the whole, he thought that the idea had real merit . . . and that decided matters.
As entertaining as it might be for the Americans to rescue their people with this BOXWOOD GREEN operation, as much as it might show the Vietnamese again that they should cooperate more closely with the Soviet Union, that they reall
y were a client state, it would also mean that the knowledge locked in those American minds would be lost to his country, and it was knowledge they must have.
How long, he wondered, could he let this one wait? The Americans moved quickly, but not that quickly. The mission had been approved at White House level only a week or so earlier. All bureaucracies were alike, after all. In Moscow it would take forever. Operation KINGPIN had gone on forever, else it would have succeeded. Only the good luck of a low-level agent in the Southern United States had allowed them to warn Hanoi, and then almost too late—but now they had real forewarning.
Politics. You just couldn’t separate that from intelligence operations. Before, they’d all but accused him of delaying matters—he shouldn’t give them that excuse again. Even client states need to be treated as comrades. The General lifted his phone to make a luncheon date. He’d bring his contact over to the embassy, just to be sure that he had some decent food to eat.
29
Last Out
There was a vicarious exhilaration in watching them. The twenty-five Marines worked out, finishing with a single-file run that looped around the helicopters parked on the deck. Sailors looked on quietly. The word was out now. The sea sled had been seen by too many, and like professional intelligence officers, sailors at their mess tables assembled the few facts and garnished them with speculation. The Marines were going into the North. After what, nobody knew, but everyone wondered. Maybe to trash a missile site and bring back some important piece of hardware. Maybe to take down a bridge, but most likely the target was human. The Vietnamese party bosses, perhaps.
“Prisoners,” a bosun’s mate third-class said, finishing his hamburger, called a “slider” in the Navy. “It’s gotta be,” he added, motioning his head to the newly arrived medical corpsmen who ate at their own isolated table. “Six corpsmen, four doctors, awful lot of talent, guys. What d’ya suppose they’re here for?”
“Jesus,” another sailor observed, sipping at his milk. “You’re right, man.”
“Feather in our cap if it comes off,” noted another.
“Dirty weather tonight,” a quartermaster put in. “The fleet-weather chief was smiling about it—and I seen him puke his guts out last night. I guess he can’t handle anything smaller’n a carrier.” USS Ogden did have an odd ride, which resulted from her configuration, and running broadside to the gusting westerly winds had only worsened it. It was always entertaining to see a chief petty officer lose his lunch—dinner in this case—and a man was unlikely to be happy about weather conditions that made him ill. There had to be a reason for it. The conclusion was obvious, and the sort of thing to make a security officer despair.
“Jesus, I hope they make it.”
“Let’s get the flight deck fodded again,” the junior bosun suggested. Heads nodded at once. A work gang was quickly assembled. Within an hour there would be not so much as a matchstick on the black no-skid surface.
“Good bunch of kids, Captain,” Dutch Maxwell observed, watching the walkdown from the starboard wing of the bridge. Every so often a man would bend down and pick up something, a “foreign object” that might destroy an engine, a result called FOD, for “foreign-object damage.” Whatever might go wrong tonight, the men were promising with their actions, it wouldn’t be the fault of their ship.
“Lots of college kids,” Franks replied, proudly watching his men. “Sometimes I think the deck division’s as smart as my wardroom.” Which was an entirely forgivable hyperbole. He wanted to say something else, the same thing that everyone was thinking: What do you suppose the chances are? He didn’t voice the thought. It would be the worst kind of bad luck. Even thinking it loudly might harm the mission, but hard as he tried he couldn’t stop his mind from forming the words.
In their quarters, the Marines were assembled around a sand-table model of the objective. They’d already gone over the mission once and were doing so again. The process would be repeated once more before lunch, and many times after it, as a whole group and as individual teams. Each man could see everything with his eyes closed, thinking back to the training site at Quantico, reliving the live-fire exercises.
“Captain Albie, sir?” A yeoman came into the compartment. He handed over a clipboard. “Message from Mr. Snake.”
The Captain of Marines grinned. “Thanks, sailor. You read it?”
The yeoman actually blushed. “Beg pardon, sir. Yes, I did. Everything’s cool.” He hesitated for the moment before adding a dispatch of his own. “Sir, my department says good luck. Kick some ass, sir.”
“You know, skipper,” Sergeant Irvin said as the yeoman left the space, “I may never be able to punch out a swabbie again.”
Albie read the dispatch. “People, our friend is in place. He counts forty-four guards, four officers, one Russian. Normal duty routine, nothing unusual is happening there.” The young captain looked up. “That’s it, Marines. We’re going in tonight.”
One of the younger Marines reached in his pocket and pulled out a large rubber band. He broke it, marked two eyes on it with his pen, and dropped it atop what they now called Snake Hill. “That dude,” he said to his teammates, “is one cool motherfucker.”
“Y’all remember now,” Irvin warned loudly. “You fire-support guys remember, he’s gonna be pounding down that hill soon as we show up. It wouldn’t do to shoot his ass.”
“No prob’, Gunny,” the fire-team leader said.
“Marines, let’s get some chow. I want you people to rest up this afternoon. Eat your veggies. We want our eyes to work in the dark. Weapons stripped and cleaned for inspection at seventeen-hun’rd,” Albie told them. “Y’all know what this is all about. Let’s stay real cool and we’ll get it done.” It was his time to meet again with the chopper crews for a final look at the insertion and extraction plans.
“Aye aye, sir,” Irvin said for the men.
“Hello, Robin.”
“Hi, Kolya,” Zacharias said weakly.
“I’m still working on better food.”
“Would be nice,” the American acknowledged.
“Try this.” Grishanov handed over some black bread his wife had sent him. The climate had already started to put mold on it, which Kolya had trimmed off with a knife. The American wolfed it down anyway. A sip from the Russian’s flask helped.
“I’ll turn you into a Russian,” the Soviet Air Force colonel said with an unguarded chuckle. “Vodka and good bread go together. I would like to show you my country.” Just to plant the seed of the idea, in a friendly way, as one man talks to another.
“I have a family, Kolya. God willing—”
“Yes, Robin, God willing.” Or North Vietnam willing, or the Soviet Union willing. Or someone. Somehow he’d save this man, and the others. So many were friends now. He knew so much about them, their marriages, good and bad, their children, their hopes and dreams. These Americans were so strange, so open. “Also, God willing, if the Chinese decide to bomb Moscow, I have a plan now to stop them.” He unfolded the map and set it on the floor. It was the result of all his talks with his American colleague, everything he had learned and analyzed formulated on a single sheet of paper. Grishanov was quite proud of it, not the least because it was the clear presentation of a highly sophisticated operational concept.
Zacharias ran his fingers over it, reading the notations in English, which looked incongruous on a map whose legend was in Cyrillic. He smiled his approval. A bright guy, Kolya, a good student in his way. The way he layered his assets, the way he had his aircraft patrolling back rather than forward. He understood defense in depth now. SAM traps at the ends of the most likely mountain passes, positioned for maximum surprise. Kolya was thinking like a bomber pilot now instead of a fighter jock. That was the first step in understanding how it was done. If every Russian PVO commander understood how to do this, then SAC would have one miserable time . . .
Dear God.
Robin’s hands stopped moving.
This wasn’t about the ChiCom
s at all.
Zacharias looked up, and his face revealed his thought even before he found the strength to speak.
“How many Badgers do the Chinese have?”
“Now? Twenty-five. They are trying to build more.”
“You can expand on everything I’ve told you.”
“We’ll have to, as they build up their force, Robin. I’ve told you that,” Grishanov said quickly and quietly, but it was too late, he saw, at least in one respect.
“I’ve told you everything,” the American said, looking down at the map. Then his eyes closed and his shoulders shook. Grishanov embraced him to ease the pain he saw.
“Robin, you’ve told me how to protect the children of my country. I have not lied to you. My father did leave his university to fight the Germans. I did have to evacuate Moscow as a child. I did lose friends that winter in the snow—little boys and little girls, Robin, children who froze to death. It did happen. I did see it.”
“And I did betray my country,” Zacharias whispered. The realization had come with the speed and violence of a falling bomb. How could he have been so blind, so stupid? Robin leaned back, feeling a sudden pain in his chest, and in that moment he prayed it was a heart attack, for the first time in his life wishing for death. But it wasn’t. It was just a contraction of his stomach and the release of a large quantity of acid, just the perfect thing, really, to eat away at his stomach as his mind ate away the defenses of his soul. He’d broken faith with his country and his God. He was damned.
