The Line

by Bob Mayer

  rison: They're fighting under the South Vietnamese flag.

  broderine: There's no need to get defensive, Bob. It's just that some people think you've got a wild card here, and we want to make sure we know how it's going to play.

  RISON: This isn't a game we're involved in here. It's war. For now the Montagnards and the South Vietnamese have the same enemy. I think that's good enough. The "Yards" can outfight any ARVN outfit any day of the week, and those people in Saigon need to remember that. They also need to remember that if the Montagnards stop fighting, the VC will have control of the highlands in less than a month and this country will be history.

  broderine: We're aware of the strategic scenario. But there are larger issues involved here. Issues that are not of concern to either the government in Saigon or the Montagnards.

  RISON: What issues?

  broderine: This war—don't you see what it is? We kicked their ass in Tet. They shot their wad. Hell, it's going to take those sons of bitches two or three years to get back up to strength in the north. They tipped their hand too soon and we handed them their ass in a sling.

  rison: I agree. If Washington would let us go, we could make a clean sweep of it.

  broderine: Washington! Hell, those pansy asses in D.C. couldn't fight their way out of paper sack. And this is just the sideshow any way. The real war is over in Europe.

  RISON: We're not at war in Europe.

  broderine: We've been at war for twenty-four years over there.

  RISON: What are you talking about?

  broderine: That's not important right now. What is important is that the general wants to know what his options are. He thinks we can downgrade our U.S. strength here and maintain the status quo. He wants to know if he can count on the Montagnards to remain a stable force.

  RISON: Downgrade? We need to finish this thing. If we put every swinging dick we have in-country into the bush, we could have this thing done with by the end of the year. You yourself just said we've hurt them bad. We need to finish them while they're down.

  BRODERINE: That's not the plan. Can the general count on your people?

  rison: Whose plan are we talking about? Since when does the general make foreign policy? He's not the National Command Authority.

  broderine: Listen, Bob, wake up. We've got two or three years of breathing space now. We can keep rotating people in and give them combat experience. Keep things going on the procurement side. After that, who knows? We can always keep the North under our thumb with the bombing. But the general feels it is essential that we maintain things as is. Those are his instructions.

  rison: From who? That isn't what Washington is putting out.

  BRODERINE: Damn it, Bob. Forget Washington. They're out of the loop on this. This is us. You're one of us. You understand.

  rison: Don't wave that fucking ring in my face, Bill. That ring says we serve and follow orders. We don't dictate policy.

  BRODERINE: We do when there's shooting involved. And we do when it involves being ready to defend our country. We can't allow that to remain in the hands of the civilians. They've screwed it up repeatedly and it's our blood that is spilled every time. This is the first war we've gotten into in this century where we've had the time to prepare. And the bigger war is just waiting over there in Europe and we need this one to remain prepared for it.

  rison: Who the hell is this "we" you're talking about?

  BRODERINE: The Long Gray Line, Bob. It's been around a hell of a lot longer than you have and it will be here long after you're gone.

  RISON: Is that a threat?

  BRODER1NE: Take it any way you want, colonel. The bottom line is, your people do what we tell you to do, or we'll gut you and your organization.

  RISON: Are you done, general?

  BRODERINE: I'm done.

  END OF TRANSCRIPT

  Trace rubbed her forehead. She turned the page and Rison's writing continued.

  They didn't fool around. They did gut me and my organization, but all that's history and you can find that story elsewhere. If you're reading this, I am most likely dead and you are just finding out about the existence of The Line. And the thing you need is proof. I don't have the tapes of that conversation, and even if I did, it would be claimed a forgery. But I do have proof. To find it, you 're going to have to go to West Point. Go to Custer's grave. Exactly one foot to the left on line with the front edge of the base of his gravestone—between his and his wife's grave—and one foot down, you'll find proof. Godspeed.

  Trace folded the pages and slid them back in the envelope. At least she knew where she needed to go next. She picked the phone up and dialed Maggie's number again.

  CHAPTER16

  PACIFIC PALISADES, HAWAII

  2 DECEMBER

  4:48 p.m. LOCAL/148 ZULU

  Boomer and Skibicki trooped into Maggie's house covered in mud. They'd spent the last several hours scouring the north coast, searching vainly for any sign of where the previous night's jumpers might have gone to earth. They'd finally called it quits after getting Skibicki's Jeep stuck on one of the countless back trails. They were both exhausted.

  Maggie met them with a laundry bag to take their dirty clothes. "Your friend Trace called an hour ago," she informed them.

  "Is she all right?" Boomer asked, pausing in the middle of unlacing his boots.

  "She says she's fine, but she thinks Colonel Rison is dead."

  "Dead?" Skibicki repeated, focusing all his attention on Maggie.

  Maggie gestured for them to forget about the mud and follow her into the kitchen. "She didn't talk to me long. She said that she talked to Rison at the game and he was shot while they were talking. She escaped. Before he got shot, Rison gave her an envelope with some information in it that says the Line exists. She's on her way to West Point to get Rison's proof."

  "West Point?" Boomer said. "That's going into the lion's den. What kind of proof is she going for?"

  "She didn't say," Maggie replied.

  "Did she leave a number where I could call her?" Boomer asked.

  "She said she didn't think it was a good idea to give her location over the phone," Maggie replied. She threw a newspaper down on the table. "I just picked up a copy of the evening paper. You might want to look at it."

  Boomer picked it up and scanned the front page. His eyes immediately focused on a story on the bottom left.

  TWO BODIES FOUND AT KAENA POINT

  A local fisherman discovered the bodies of two men at Kaena Point early this morning. Both men had been shot but police were unwilling to release any more information. The identity of the men has not been released.

  Boomer checked the rest of the article, but it yielded little information. "The police have found the bodies from last night," Boomer said, laying the paper down.

  "Any ID?" Skibicki asked, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  "Not according to the paper, but we don't know what the police have. What about the weapons we used?"

  "I deep-sixed those," Skibicki said. "That's one of the things I took care of while I was gone."

  Boomer was relieved that those pieces of evidence were gone.

  Maggie wasn't done. "Trace also said for you to get the story about what happened to Colonel Rison in Vietnam from Ski."

  Boomer turned to the sergeant major. "What does that mean?"

  Skibicki wearily sank down into a chair. "Rison was the best damn commander I ever served under. What it means is that Rison probably didn't have the time to tell her about what happened to him when he ran afoul of The Line."

  "And you know?" Boomer demanded.

  "Yes, I know."

  Boomer was agitated. "Why didn't you tell me everything you knew?"

  "Because I didn't have proof and I didn't really know what was going on," Skibicki snapped. "Rison had the proof and the real knowledge. And now Trace is going after it. I also didn't make all the connections with what happened back then with what's going on now. It's been a long time."

 
; Boomer sat across from him. "Tell me what you do know."

  Maggie bustled over with mugs of coffee and sat on the other corner of the table as Skibicki gathered his thoughts.

  "When you first came to me about The Line, I tried to blow you off. I didn't know why you were asking me, and quite honestly, I thought you might be from them. They want that proof back too. They want it bad—bad enough to kill for. It was only when I realized who your dad was that I knew you probably weren't from The Line, but even then I had to play it safe."

  Skibicki looked off, out at the ocean. "I ran into The Line when Rison did—way back in Vietnam. Of course I didn't know it was called The Line or anything about it. That all came later. It was after the mission where your dad died. We were running operations constantly so there wasn't any time to stand around and contemplate things. I got a new team. This time I was the team leader, we were so short of personnel."

  "I also got a new assignment. Command and Control North, MACV-SOG. We were also under B-57, Project Gamma, but we weren't going west. We were going north, right into the little shitheads’ backyard and snooping around. We were also crossing into Laos to get earlier readings on stuff moving south through there and into Cambodia on what everyone called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but it wasn't just one trail—it was a whole complex of trails and roads and supply depots and staging areas."

  "You got to understand something else that was going at the same time, something that was affecting Special Forces throughout the theater. A lot of our A Teams in 5th Group proper were working with the Montagnards—had been for years. And that was a big burr under the skin of the South Vietnamese government. In 1964, the Montagnards in the Ban Me Thout region had actually rebelled against the government, and it was only with the greatest of diplomacy that the Special Forces advisors in the area were able to keep the peace."

  "The teams working with the Yards were always caught between a rock and a hard place. The Yards were damn good fighters, but they hated the South Vietnamese as much as they hated the North and if you remember rightly, our government's policy was to support the South, not the Montagnards."

  Skibicki shook his head. "I'm not sure about the exact political maneuvering. All I know is what Colonel Rison told me afterwards and what I saw myself. Rison said that he was approached by someone sent by the MACV Commanding General in Saigon and told to back off on supporting the Montagnards. They wanted us to disarm over fifty percent of our indigenous forces. Rison refused to do that, so the regular Army assholes started doing whatever they could to screw with our operations. Since they also had the help of the CIA, you could tell that someone really high up was rocking the boat."

  "In the middle of this bullshit we were trying to fight a war. And it was starting to go badly in B-57. We still had to deal with our counterparts in the LLDB—the South Vietnamese army—and sometimes it was hard to tell who was more of a threat, the LLDB or the VC. Our counterintel guy was picking up information that our fucking LLDB counterparts were selling ammunition and weapons to the North Vietnamese. So much for democracy and the free enterprise system."

  "We tried tightening down the screws on security at CCN headquarters but we were still losing people on missions and it was obvious there was a leak. But it wasn't like we could just call time-out and put all our energy into finding out where the leak was. Our counterintel guys went to work on it and we kept getting on board the choppers and going out not knowing if our mission was compromised from the word go. You want to talk about having a shit feeling in your gut, you try that someday, flying into the badlands not knowing whether your whole OPLAN has been compromised and the bad guys were waiting for you to get off the bird."

  "Then my team, RT Texas, went on a mission in, well, let's simply call it a classified area, although I can tell you now that it was north of the DMZ. We came across what had been an enemy base camp. It was empty. We searched the place, sometimes you'd be amazed what you can find left behind, and hit paydirt: we found some film negatives that had been discarded in a pile of trash that had been half burnt. We brought those back with us."

  Skibicki laughed, a low growl that held no mirth. "We had the double-dealing motherfucker on film: one of our LLDB agents, Ta Chon, meeting with North Vietnamese in uniform. We brought the son of a bitch in and wired him up to the polygraph and he flunked it. Shit, he was sweating bullets and we knew that he knew we knew."

  Skibicki paused and Boomer and Maggie both impatiently waited for him to continue. The sergeant major took a deep breath, then picked up the story.

  "I was ready to pop Chon right then and there. Hell, I'd lost friends on those teams he'd compromised. Rison was down in Saigon at some damn meeting, so he was out of the net. The FOB executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Killebrew, wasn't authorized to make such a command decision, so he went to the CIA for instructions. In reality, he wanted to turn Chon over to them and he knew that would take care of that. We'd done it before. The spooks liked fresh meat. Plus there was always the possibility the Company could triple Chon and turn him back against his own people and we could scarf up the rest of his buddies."

  "But what Killebrew didn't know was that the CIA was wired in with The Line and they were waiting for something like this. I didn't know it either when I went to the CIA safe house outside Nha Trang with Chon. The asshole I talked to wouldn't take Chon. He suggested to me that we 'eliminate' Chon ourselves since we had such strong evidence. Hell, he didn't suggest it, he practically ordered me to do it."

  Skibicki stretched out his massive arms and glanced at the other two occupants of the room. The only sound was the wind blowing off the porch moving a chime back and forth.

  "We took Chon back to the FOB. Then me and another guy, we shot Chon up with morphine, took him out into the bay, cut a vein so that the sharks would find him, and I popped him twice in the head with my High Standard .22. We weighed the body down with chains, and dumped him overboard." Skibicki said it all flatly, like he was describing a trip to the laundromat.

  "It was all said and done by the time Rison got back to the FOB from a MACV command and staff meeting in Saigon. I went in with Killebrew and briefed Rison on what had happened. I think he knew right away that something stunk about the way the CIA spook had reacted, but fuck, the body was already a body. Couldn't resurrect the son of a bitch. We made up a cover story to explain Chon disappearing. We said we sent him on a cross-border op and we never heard from him again. And that wasn't that far out because, like I said, we were losing lots of people over the fence."

  "The shit hit the fan the next day. Somebody, and to this day I swear it was the CIA, even though they produced some low ranking, non-SF Intel dink to go public, blew the whistle."

  "That's all the general in Saigon needed. He called Rison up and asked him what happened. Rison gave him the cover story. The general blew a gasket, since he already had heard the true story and had Rison arrested. In the middle of a war, our own people arrested a full bull colonel in the U.S. Army!"

  "They also picked up Killebrew, me, and the other fellow who helped me, a guy named Harry Franks. We were charged with murder." Skibicki shook his head, still incredulous after all these years. "Here we were, in the middle of the most fucked-up war you've ever seen, and we're getting charged with murder for wasting a double agent. It was enough to make you cry."

  "Well, even the general couldn't keep a lid on it. The press got a hold of the story and it hit the headlines all over back in the states. There was a big public outcry over Americans getting jailed, even if we did kill someone. Hell, John Wayne had made a movie about the Green Berets; people liked us. And by then most everyone was sick of the war and it looked like we were just being set up, which we were, except no one in the public knew the real reason."

  "So it didn't work out quite like the general wanted. He didn't get to see Colonel Rison and the rest of us go to jail, but he did at least get the colonel out of the way. Rison's career was over. Never mind the murder, there was still the fact that
he had lied to the general when he gave him the cover story. After all," Skibicki's voice dripped sarcasm, "we were only supposed to kill people, not lie about it."

  "The real thing that got us off, though, was what had started it in the first place—the CIA. They wouldn't allow their people to testify, so that sort of stalled the whole thing out. After all, my defense was that I'd been told to waste the little motherfucker by the spook. There was no way the Company was going to put one of their own on the stand under oath."

  "The general didn't waste any time in trying to get Special Forces in-country under his control, though. Rison was still in the brig down in Saigon when the general appointed some leg colonel from his staff to take over the FOB. The son of a bitch tried to put on a green beret and not only was he not SF-qualified, he wasn't even jump-qualified. The FOB sergeant major, old Terry Hollihan, a good man, had a fucking fit. He told the sorry SOB to take the goddamn jump wings and beret off."

  "The colonel then tried to get around SF by going down to the LLDB jump school and getting airborne-qualified by doing a few chopper blasts. It was a real shame when he broke his leg on the third jump." Skibicki grinned a wicked smile. "Of course that might have had something to do with Hollihan's jumpmaster inspecting the colonel's gear just prior to the jump. I guess the man was lucky he was alive. I'd have cut his damn static line."

  Skibicki's face turned serious. "But all that's a roundabout way to get you to what you really want to know. We got off. They dropped the charges. But Rison knew that he had to do something or The Line would kill Special Forces."

  "So he came to me and Harry and Lieutenant Colonel Killebrew and we talked about it. We needed something on them. Something to act as a countermeasure. There wasn't much the officers could do. Rison had to go back to the States. His career was over. Killebrew was reassigned in-country. But before he left, Rison pulled a few strings and Harry and I disappeared into the Studies and Observation Group under deep cover with one last mission assigned to us by our former commander: get something on The Line."