The Line

by Bob Mayer

  "In May of 'sixty-nine we got information about an NVA regiment staging right across the border from an A Camp at Tong Le Chon so we were ordered to go in and check it out. Your dad was the team commander, I was the man with the radio, and we had four 'little people'—Mon- tagnard natives—along for security."

  Skibicki's eyes were unfocused as he remembered. "It was supposed to be a quick in and out, just to check to see if the bad guys were preparing to attack. It wasn't straightforward though. They moved us out of the normal launch site to another place. It was somewhere I'd never seen before and it sure wasn't SF run. We got a briefing from some CIA dude assigned to CCN—Combat Control North—and they gave us a spook straphanger. Your dad didn't like that one bit, but that's the bitch of being in the green machine; our's is but to do and die, right?"

  Skibicki didn't wait for an answer. "So we went in on one slick. We had two Cobras flying cover—two Cobras painted black. Air America at work. You wouldn't believe the amount of stuff the CIA had working over there. Just the little I saw at that camp hinted at an operation beyond anything that's ever been written or talked about."

  "Everything went to shit from the word go. We didn't go in where we were supposed to. I had no idea where the fuck we were but it certainly wasn't across the border from Tong Le Chon. Your dad was arguing with the spook. Right there on the fucking landing zone they're having a Goddamn argument. Talk about giving you the shits. Your dad wanted us out. The spook overruled him. Your dad had me come up on the guard net and call for extraction. CCN denied it and told us to continue mission. Except now we didn't know what the fuck the mission was, other than go with this spook and watch his ass. And that guy was none too happy about us coming up on the radio trying to get out of there."

  Skibicki shook his head. "If I'd have known then what I know now, I would have greased the spook right then and there and called in a 'prairie fire'—that was our code word for emergency extraction. We had our own air assets and we could have gotten out, although there would have been hell to pay later. But we still had that good Army training: follow orders, even if you don't know where the fuck they're coming from. I'll tell you one thing I learned from that: if you ever get in the position where you got to kill someone to keep the shit from hitting the fan, kill 'em, drive on, and don't say a fucking word about it. That's what we should have done."

  "But I hadn't learned that yet. So, there we were over the border, moving west and north along this ridgeline to some mysterious fucking rendezvous when we got hit. We had one of the little people at point and he got his shit blown away." Skibicki looked Boomer in the eyes. "You ever been on the receiving end in an ambush?"

  Boomer shook his head, remembering the screams of the wounded near the bus.

  "But you been shot at right?"

  "Yeah, I've been shot at."

  "Well," Skibicki continued, "you know it isn't like in the movies. It was confusing as crap. Your dad was screaming for us to break contact and move downridge. Not the preferred direction, but we didn't have much choice since they already had the high ground. Of course the spook didn't know our immediate actions drills, but he knew enough to get out of the way and run. We broke contact, leaving behind two of our little people dead and the rest of us all hit somewhere. I had shrapnel wounds all along my left side from a grenade, but fear can be a mighty motivator. We beat feet, leapfrogging. Two men laying down a base of fire, two running, then alternating. The spook helped some, he had a Swedish K and he emptied a magazine now and then over our heads."

  "To make a long story short, we ran until we hit the first piece of open ground we could find. The spook got on the radio and called in for extraction from his people. Then we got hit on the edge of the PZ. Those son-of-a-bitches, whoever the fuck they were, wanted us bad. The spook got hit right at the start—caught a round through the chest. We lost the last two Montagnards and your dad took a round through his thigh. I was bandaging up the spook, trying to seal off his sucking chest wound, when I opened up the small ruck he was carrying, looking for anything I could use to block off the air coming out of the hole in his lung."

  "There was gold in there. Four fucking bars of gold." Skibicki laughed bitterly. "Of course that shit wasn't very useful at the moment. That's when I got hit again." He tapped the side of his head. "Lucky I got a thick skull."

  Skibicki fell silent and Boomer waited for a few seconds. "Then what happened?" he finally asked.

  "The black Cobra gunships came in. Your dad directed their fire using the spook's radio. Jesus, he was great, Boomer." Skibicki shook his head wonderingly at that day so long ago. "A true fucking professional. I was half out of it. I couldn't see a damn thing; my eyes were full of blood, and I had a hell of a headache," he said. "I just kept firing in the general direction of the bad guys which wasn't hard to do since we were surrounded."

  "Your dad carried me out to the slick that came in. He threw me on board and he went back to get the spook. That was a big mistake. He was carrying the spook back when they got cut down. The bad guys must have brought up a heavy machine gun by that time and they opened up from the tree line. We got the bodies on board and the pilots got us the hell out of there in a hurry. The bird took a lot of hits on the way out but it got back in one piece." Skibicki looked at Boomer. "Your dad and the spook were KIA."

  "But that's not what his citation read," Boomer said. He knew a bit about classified operations and he was confused. "How did my dad get a Medal of Honor for a cross-border mission? I thought all that stuff got buried deep. Hell, there's guys who got wounded on some of those cross- border missions who still can't get VA treatment since their wounds aren't recorded anywhere because they weren't legally supposed to be where they were when they got hit. The citation said he was killed defending an A Camp in South Vietnam, not across the border."

  Skibicki gave a wicked grin. "I did that. Me and the Special Operations Commander in-country, Colonel Rison. I was in the hospital recovering when Rison came to ask me what had happened. When I told him, he wrote up the award just as you saw it. The CIA backed the story. It was a trade-off. I kept silent about what really happened and your dad got the CMH. It was the least we could do for him."

  "What did happen?" Boomer asked. "What was that guy carrying gold for?"

  "You know what CIA stands for, don't you?" Skibicki didn't bother to wait for an answer. "Cocaine in America. Those guys were running a whole 'nother show over there. Still probably are."

  "It was a drug operation?" Boomer asked, not as shocked as he probably should have been; his years in Delta had shown him a thing or two about the real world.

  Skibicki shrugged. "I don't know that for sure, but what the hell else would that guy be carrying gold bars into the jungle for? He might have been paying some mercenary groups that were in the CIA's employ. At least that was what the spooks briefed me afterwards, but I think that's a bullshit cover story. If we were going in to pay off mercenaries, why didn't we just land at the mercenaries' camp. If we were paying them, they should have been friendly, right?"

  Skibicki shook his head. "No, I heard enough and seen enough over there to know. It was a drug op. Gold for drugs, which they could turn a big profit on back here in the states. How the hell do you think they can fund all their bullshit? And those people who were after us wanted us a hell of a lot more than the VC and NVA usually did. They wanted us real bad to absorb the casualties they took."

  "But what about the Army?" Boomer asked. "Didn't the Special Ops commander—this Colonel Rison—do anything about his people getting caught up in that?"

  "Listen, Boomer. I don't know what the hell you've been doing, but let me tell you a few things I've learned in my time. One is that you don't fuck with the CIA. And the other is that the CIA and the top ranks of the Army are wired in tight. It's us guys wearing the green beanies who are on the outside. Everyone always thinks the CIA is some world unto its own, but you just need to look at its history to see that it was formed right out of the Army at the e
nd of the Second World War. And its aims and the Army's have never been very far apart. Hell, Boomer, whenever you give someone a whole lot of power, then cloak it in secrecy in the name of national security, you got the ingredients for some bad shit to happen."

  "Hell, that whole fucking war was just like a big game for some of them people. Think about it. What the fuck were we doing? We didn't fight it to win, and we didn't fight it to lose. We just sort of dicked around until the damn civilians had enough of it and made us come home."

  Boomer had heard it all before from other veterans. He was surprised, though, when Skibicki leaned forward and grabbed his arm.

  "You went to West Point, didn't you? I heard you took the Presidential from your dad's medal."

  "Yeah," Boomer said, extracting his arm from the other man's fierce grip.

  "That's pretty ironic," Skibicki growled, "considering how it was West Pointers that got your dad killed."

  "What do you mean? You said it was the CIA."

  "Colonel Rison was a West Pointer. He told me about some of the shit that was going on. Hell, they tried to court-martial him about six months after your dad got killed."

  "What happened to him?" Boomer asked.

  Skibicki shook his head. "He ran into the establishment and they broke him. And he was one of them too, a West Pointer, but they busted his ass. We damn near had the closest thing to a revolt that the U.S. Army ever saw when they arrested Rison at group headquarters in Nha Trang. A camps all over the country were locking and loading and ready to fight it out with the regular Army. Hell, all us guys in SOG were ready to fly into Saigon and waste those regular motherfuckers at MACV headquarters."

  "Rison was arrested?" Boomer asked. "For what?"

  "Remember that double agent I mentioned earlier?" Skibicki paused and seemed to consider what he was saying and then changed his mind. "You don't want to get into all that." Skibicki waved a hand. "Forget what I said all right? I've heard so much bullshit in twenty-nine years in the service that I can't remember what's real and what's not. Forget it."

  Despite Boomer's attempts at rekindling the subject, Skibicki refused to talk and Boomer reluctantly went with him back to the tunnel. He spent the rest of the morning going through the classified files, destroying out of date folders and inventorying what was left. His mind was only half on his job, and just before lunch he cornered Skibicki, who was in the very rear of the tunnel, pulling maintenance on scuba equipment.

  "Sergeant major, do you know someone at Bragg in the schoolhouse who can check records?"

  "What kind of records?" Skibicki asked, carefully leaning a scuba tank against a wall locker.

  "Q Course graduates. Or, more specifically, eighteen qualified officers."

  Skibicki nodded. "Sure." He glanced at the large dive watch on his wrist. "Only problem is that it's 1200 here. That makes it 1700 on a Thursday afternoon on the east coast. They'll all be at the Green Beret club at Bragg sucking down brews."

  "Can you do it first thing tomorrow?"

  "Who do you want me to check on?"

  "A major named Keyes."

  "The new CO for Alpha, 1st of the 1st?"

  Boomer nodded.

  Skibicki's heavily tanned arms rippled as he hoisted the air tank and settled it in place in the wall locker. "That battalion in Okinawa has been fucked up for twenty years, sir. Never could quite figure out what was going on out there. They had that big shitstorm eight years ago about running demo into Thailand and selling it on the black market. Hell, 60 Minutes did a special on it. Then they had that plot to kill one of the company sergeant majors."

  Boomer had heard about some of that. It had been a bad blemish on the name of Special Forces in the media. Every so often there was an article about some Green Beret doing something stupid, and it tainted the entire Special Operations community. One of the most aggravating things for Boomer was when he walked into a bookstore and saw the book Fatal Vision with the green beret with the old 5th Group flash and the medical corps insignia on the cover. The subject of the book, McDonald, had not even been Special Forces-qualified, yet he had always been referred to as the "Green Beret Doctor."

  There was no doubt that some Special Forces people went over the edge occasionally. When an organization attracted highly qualified people as SF did, it invariably attracted its own share of highly qualified wackos. When Boomer had gone through selection for Delta Force, he had to go through severe physical and mental challenges that had knocked out over ninety-five percent of his classmates. Then the survivors had undergone a rigorous psychological screening to find out if they could handle the stress of the job and were mentally stable.

  In retrospect, Boomer found the psych screening amusing, although at the time it had been very serious—several otherwise highly qualified individuals who had passed all other tests had been washed out on the word of the psych panel. Boomer had to wonder what kind of stable personality they were looking for: one that was capable of performing brutal tasks, yet not enough of a sociopath to ignore orders.

  All those thoughts brought Boomer's mind back to the matter of 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group. "I heard the battalion commander out there got relieved over that black market stuff."

  Skibicki took out talcum powder and began sprinkling it on the rubber cuffs of a dry suit. "Nope. He finished his tour and got his little command box checked off. They said he wasn't responsible. That he didn't know what was going on in his own unit."

  "You heard anything about strange personnel procedures out there?" Boomer asked.

  Skibicki put the talcum powder down. "We don't use this scuba gear too much here, but we're authorized four dive slots. I pull one, Colonel Falk has one, and we got two open." He looked at the patch on Boomer's chest. "You definitely want to get some diving in while you're here. We got some great water. I'll sign you out a complete set."

  "I'd like that," Boomer said.

  Skibicki leaned back against the wall locker and folded his massive arms. He spoke slowly. "Yeah, there's some weird shit going on in 1st Battalion. I'll check on that name for you."

  The scuba gear reminded Boomer of the message in his pocket. "One other thing, sergeant major. Do you know of a jump scheduled for early morning on the second?"

  "Saturday morning? No."

  "Ever heard of a Task Force Reaper?"

  "No."

  "Ever heard of a water DZ named Gumbo?"

  "Yeah. That's off the northeast corner of the island. We use it once in a while for water jumps."

  Boomer pulled the message out of his pocket and silently handed it over. Skibicki scanned it. "If someone's jumping Gumbo Saturday morning, I sure as shit should have heard about it because there ain't too many people that can be drop zone safety officer for a water jump on this island other than me. I should have been tasked for bodies to pull drop zone safety. According to safety regs you have to have one boat per jumper. It's a damn nightmare. I don't know why the colonel hasn't told me about this."

  "Maybe they aren't having any safety boats." Boomer said. "Maybe the colonel doesn't want you to know about these people coming in. He got kind of pissed when he saw that I had broken the message out."

  Skibicki's eyes widened slightly. "If they ain't using safety boats, then they're violating about twenty fucking regulations. And that means they're planning on drowning their chutes and not recovering them. You know how much a chute costs? Sounds to me like someone's planning a real-world operation."

  "Any idea where these people are from?" Boomer asked.

  "Not a clue, and I don't think I'll be going to ask the colonel either. He don't want me to know, I don't fucking know." Skibicki answered, handing back the message.

  Boomer pocketed the piece of paper and hesitated. He had one last question, triggered by Skibicki's comments. "Sergeant major, have you ever heard of an organization called The Line?"

  Skibicki paused ever so briefly, then answered almost inaudibly, his eyes locked on the scuba locker. "No."


  "You sure?" Boomer pressed, picking up the hesitation. "The reason I'm asking is 'cause you said my dad's death was caused by West Pointers and I've heard that there was this group of West—"

  "I said no," Skibicki snapped, glaring at Boomer. He turned and looked away for a few seconds, regaining his composure. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card and handed it to Boomer. A green beret with a knife across it was embossed on it. Along the top it said paratrooper, ranger, special forces, world traveler, singer, salesman, bullshit artist. Skibicki's home and work address and phone numbers were listed in the center. At the bottom the rest of Skibicki's qualifications were listed: revolutions started; orgies organized; assassinations plotted; bars emptied; alligators castrated; tigers tamed; virgins converted; others satisfied.

  "I only did that shit in my younger days," Skibicki said, noting Boomer reading it. "You need anything, you give me a call, OK? I don't know why you're here, but it sounds like you might be needing some help."

  Boomer took the card. "Thanks, sergeant major, but I'm just here TDY for a couple of weeks to take it easy."

  "Uh-huh," Skibicki said, turning back to the equipment. "Well, be careful taking it easy."

  CHAPTER 6

  MAKAKILO, OAHU, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS

  30 NOVEMBER

  1:30 p.m. LOCAL/2330 ZULU

  It was payday, a significant event for the military. Although most soldiers now had direct deposit twice a month, the last duty day of the month was still formerly known as payday. It was usually designated as a half day of work with the morning being given over to such vital military acts as a Class A (dress) uniform inspection.

  Trace had forgotten that it was payday when she'd told Boomer what time she'd be home. Camp Smith, where she worked, was a small post run by the Marines nestled in the foothills of Halawa Heights. It was the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) and also housed Headquarters Fleet Marine Force Pacific.