by Robin Moore
Hanging between life and death, staring straight up, the luckless sentries could only wonder why it took so long before the fatal twist of the rope. They didn’t see the last of the invaders, half dragging, half carrying a partially dressed woman, run past them through the gate and jump into the cab of a three-quarter ton truck which pulled up at the gate.
Then the garrotes were tightened and the guards died a little. When they came back to life there was no sign of any disturbance and no sounds from the home of Mr. Hinh. Since they were alive and unharmed and neither had a bruise on his neck they decided to follow their superiors’ example and not bring unpleasant matters to official attention. Instead they continued to patrol the entrance to Mr. Hinh’s home, perhaps with more vigilance than before.
The rendezvous point was Co Binh’s quarters behind the school. Targar entered, personally carrying the comparatively diminutive Ling. The colonel was thrown naked on the floor and a light bulb turned on him. His three abductors stared down at him. Ossidian, Martell, and I had arrived first, driving off in the jeep as soon as we saw the operation had come off successfully. A few moments later, Swiggert, Co Binh and the other three members of our special task force arrived.
Colonel Ling began to moan and Targar motioned to the three strikers who had kidnapped the prisoner. Immediately they jumped him and held him down while Targar got a needle into the vein in the bend of his arm and injected sodium pentathol into the Communist’s blood stream.
Then Ling was hoisted onto a cot and Ossidian’s great moment came. Through an interpreter he had been training for two months, he interrogated the Viet Cong leader, now full of the so-called truth serum, for almost three hours. The entire interrogation was recorded on tape.
Meanwhile, Brandy helped Co Binh calm down, talking to her in French, which was like her native language. He helped her pack those things she wanted to keep, gave her 10,000 piastres, and warned her that even though Mr. Hinh had been collaborating with the VC there was nothing the local authorities would do to him. He gave them all too much money.
Therefore, Brandy warned, she had better go quietly back to the Catholic school and ask for her job back. She had enough money to live comfortably and anonymously for a year or two and by then the Viet Cong would no longer be looking for her, if, indeed, they ever did.
Brandy and I drove Co Binh out to the province capital airstrip. It was almost 5:00 A.M. now. The guards saluted as we drove in. Brandy stopped the jeep, jumped out, licked a finger to test the wind direction, and drove to the far end of the strip and parked the jeep heading downwind.
He and Co Binh talked in French for a few moments. Co Binh said she was happy and she was sure the Church would forgive her for what she had done to help us capture the Communist leader.
The buzz of a plane sounded overhead and Brandy snapped on the lights of the jeep. Five minutes later a cantilevered high-wing, single engine heliocourier, or U-10, landed and pulled up in front of the jeep.
Only Combined Studies Group, the operating arm of the CIA, flew heliocouriers in Vietnam. Brandy led Co Binh from her jeep to the civilian pilot of the plane who helped her in.
“Take good care of this girl,” Brandy said. “She’s given much to keep this war from getting completely out of control.”
“Will do, Captain,” the pilot acknowledged cheerfully. Making sure Co Binh was safely strapped in, he hopped up into the plane beside her and in moments the engine was turning over and the plane was airborne.
Brandy watched the trim little airship take off in under fifty feet, and then we got back into the jeep and headed for town.
“You know,” Brandy said musingly, “this is the first woman agent I ever got out alive? And she was the one I most hoped would be permitted to live.
“Ossidian had a big argument about this operation with me,” he said drolly. “He thought the girl could have made Hinh think she had nothing to do with our little job tonight and gone on being an agent for us.”
We started back toward the school and Brandy’s delight bubbled over. “Well, now we get the whorehouse going and a new female agent working. With the money we make operating the whorehouse we can pay maybe two teachers to keep the school going. And still we do what Ossidian likes so much, we kill two birds with one stone.”
6
Coup De Grâce
1
The city of Saigon is the R and R (rest and rehabilitation) center for every fighting man in South Vietnam with an abundance of piastres in his pockets—including, as I was shortly to discover, off-duty Viet Cong guerrillas.
Almost all Americans get to “the Paris of the Orient” at least once during a tour of duty. They can eat excellent meals at the many restaurants and enjoy some of the world’s most exotic and available women. Religious demonstrations notwithstanding, Saigon manifests few indications of the vicious guerrilla war festering throughout the rest of the country.
Since my work was with Special Forces in the boondocks, I tried to keep out of Saigon as much as possible but Major Fritz Scharne had his office there. Scharne was on loan from Special Forces to direct the training of the Vietnamese Rangers, the elite assault troops of the ARVN. Born in Germany, he had been a member of the Hitler Youth. In 1939, at the age of fifteen, he left Germany when his father came to the United States to take over a deceased brother’s prosperous business in Milwaukee.
Fritz made the adjustment from militant German youth to militant American youth, and was a valuable asset to the United States from D-Day until the end of the war. He was a natural warrior, and after finishing college and trying business for a few years he applied for a commission in the Army. Wounded twice in Korea, he discovered Special Forces in 1953, shortly after the unit had been activated; he had stuck with it ever since. He was a Special Forces legend. While serving with the 10th Special Forces Group in Bad Tölz he had been so popular that the Bavarians tried to elect him mayor. Scharne had to decline. The army had a rule against moonlighting, to say nothing of the State Department’s stringent ban on citizens running for elective offices in foreign countries.
Major Scharne was one of the first in Special Forces to fight the Pathet Lao Communists in Laos and had completed two tours of duty in Vietnam. Wherever I went I heard stories about Fritzie, and finally I had arranged an introduction.
I couldn’t have picked a less opportune moment to come to Saigon. South Vietnam’s capital was about due for its second snowstorm of the year—the arrival of a jet-load of high U.S. administration officials from Washington. Prior to their visit, blanket requests were issued for optimistic progress reports—which were then neatly transcribed to little white cards for easy referral at the briefing sessions. This was always a discouraging and frustrating time for field officers who were close to the unpleasant truths of daily fighting in Vietnam.
I met Major Scharne in his office at the MAAG compound, and that evening we had drinks on the roof of his hotel. We had many friends in common, including the late Captain Andy Bellman who had been killed on a Ranger operation shortly after being transferred from a Special Forces group at Fort Bragg to serve as Scharne’s assistant. Soon Scharne and I were conversing like old friends, discussing the coming top-level briefings. Acidly he told me how he had spent the last two days supplying his share of favorable after-action reports for the white-card snow job; the unpalatable truths he would have liked to pass on to the Washington decision-makers were rejected out of hand.
“I have never, in my career, seen so many panic-hit colonels and generals,” Scharne stated in his curious high-pitched voice. “I was at the embassy, even, for a lecture. Everybody is afraid that somebody will be rocking the boat. So it goes in an election year.” He stared across the rooftops of Saigon’s Chinese community thoughtfully. “All of us who have been known to talk too loud at the wrong time, they are sending out of Saigon.”
Then Fritz smiled at me. “But I must say one thing to you—our government of the United States may not be the best possible government, b
ut it is still the best government the world has ever known in its history.”
He drained his beer. “Well, they want me out of Saigon when the Secretary and his party come in next week. So I will take the graduating class of Rangers out on an operation against the Viet Cong. I like to watch them train on stand-up-shoot-back targets.”
I said I’d like to go out on an operation like that.
“Don’t be too eager,” he said. “It was on the last one that Andy Bellman was murdered.”
“Murdered!”
“Yes, murdered,” Scharne repeated harshly. “We were hit by a hard-core VC battalion and Andy was wounded in both legs. We had to fall back or lose the whole class. When the VC finally disappeared into the jungle, we returned and found Andy had been shot through the head with a pistol at a range of about six inches. Traditional coup de grâce.”
“But that doesn’t sound like the VC.”
“Certain things about the operation are classified,” Scharne said.
I knew a wave-off when I heard one. “I’ve got to stick around Saigon for a day or so,” I said. “I might catch a story. But I won’t be able to stand Saigon much longer, particularly with all the wheels arriving. How about it? Will you take me on the next operation?”
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” Scharne replied. “Come to the Cercle Racquette as my guest tomorrow. We’ll talk about the operation then.”
“Sounds like a pretty fancy place.”
“I joined a couple of months ago. Tennis courts, a big swimming pool, lots of pretty French girls. . . . Of course they all dislike Americans.” Scharne laughed. “Now I know how my cousins from the fatherland felt when they were occupying Paris during the war.”
“They couldn’t hate us too much if they let Americans join their club,” I pointed out.
“Sheer economic necessity. The Cercle costs a lot to keep up, and there are not so many rich Frenchmen around Saigon now. Incidentally, I always talk French there. That way it isn’t so obvious we’re Americans.”
“You’ve got a guest—French speaking,” I added.
“Good. I’ll pick you up in my jeep tomorrow morning.”
Promptly at 11:00 Scharne arrived at the Continental Palace. He was wearing white duck slacks and a white sport shirt. I remarked how stylish he looked as we set off in his jeep.
It was about a fifteen-minute drive to the Cercle Racquette—an oasis in the middle of the torrid city. Black wood and brass doors in the high white wall led to manicured lawns lined with clipped box hedges. Scharne took me downstairs in the spacious colonial-style clubhouse where we changed. Sitting at the pool we ordered Pernod and water and talking in French—English for technical phrases—we sunbathed and swam.
“How about a game of tennis before lunch?” he asked.
“OK, if you have an extra racket.”
He went back to the locker room, got two rackets, and we walked over to the courts. Suddenly Scharne recoiled, his eyes fixed on the tennis court where a mixed doubles game was in progress. The girls were both very pretty, one of them streaming long blonde hair as she went for the ball, but it was her partner who drew the major’s intense stare.
“It’s the cowboy!” Scharne said, his voice shrill with surprise, his eyes fixed on the dark, well-built man in a net shirt who was serving.
“Cowboy?” I asked.
“Let’s sit down a minute.” I followed him to a table under the nearby shade tree.
“What’s the flap, Fritz?” I asked settling in a wicker chair.
Scharne didn’t answer for a few moments and then, reluctantly, he turned from the tennis court. “I told you the whole thing is classified. Well, you knew Bellman.” He glanced at the tennis court again and back to me. “That stud who just won his serve leads the VC battalion that hit our last operation. He was the one who murdered Andy.”
“But he’s a Caucasian!”
“Look, this is all highly classified. It would be my career if the thing gets out and is blown up into a big international flap.”
“You can trust me to keep quiet, Fritz. What happened?”
Scharne was staring at the tennis player. “We call him the cowboy. He wears a Stetson, fights bare-chested with a whistle dangling from his neck, always has on a pair of Levi’s and Western boots. He’s a Frenchman, of course.”
“So there is truth in the rumor that the VC have French advisers.”
“They’re not just advisers, they have operational control. They’re more realistic than we are,” Scharne added bitterly.
I looked over at the tennis court. “That’s the man who killed Andy Bellman?”
“Affirmative. With a .45 slug through the head. I saw him myself through a pair of field glasses, although I never knew before who he was. Oh, that’s the cowboy, all right. Other Ranger and paratroop companies have been hit by his battalion. He singles out a company or two of the best we have to offer, and whips them bad, killing all the wounded. He particularly likes to get Americans.”
“Sounds like the cowboy is doing a real job on morale.”
“You have to hand it to him. Just when we were beginning to give the so-called elite ARVN units confidence in themselves and in us, he knocks it to hell. They’re going to think American advisers aren’t as good as the cowboy and the other frogs working with the Communists.”
“Are American advisers the best?” I asked, hoping to provoke a reaction.
Scharne gave me a sharp look. “Makes a big difference in a fight when you can give direct orders. If I had operational control of a Vietnamese Ranger battalion—one I had trained myself—I could tear up anything the VC had. I’d go after a VC regiment. But you know what it is to advise, wait for your counterpart to make up his mind how much, if any, of your advice he’s going to accept, and only then begin to act.”
Sitting in his swim trunks, a towel draped around his neck, Scharne’s eyes never strayed from the man on the tennis court. “Just because the damned frogs couldn’t win their own war over here, and got kicked out of their richest colony, they can’t stand to see us win now.
“The French have the funny notion they can do business with the Communists. If these people”—he waved, taking in the whole anachronistic group of French colonials—“and France, can persuade the United States to sit down at the bargaining table and neutralize South Vietnam, they think the Commies will let them keep their rich properties instead of having to sell control of them to the Vietnamese according to the agreements signed in Geneva after they were licked at Dien Bien Phu.”
Scharne shrugged. “And the way our hands are tied in this war we’ll end up doing just that. But by me the French are a mean, money-grabbing, spiteful—”
“I seem to detect a somewhat Germanic outlook,” I couldn’t help saying.
“Whatever it is, that bastard killed Andy. Now that I know who he is, he’s got to be greased!”
“This I want to see.”
The tennis match ended, the cowboy and his pretty partner apparently the winners. There was a short conversation at the net and then the couple walked toward us and took the adjoining table under the shade tree. A Vietnamese waiter materialized beside them, took their order and left.
“The French get all the service around here,” Scharne mock-grumbled in English when the waiter returned a few minutes later with their order. Scharne spoke to the waiter loudly, in poor but comprehensible French. “I have been trying to make the best fighting men in Vietnam out of your Rangers and when I come back here to relax I can’t get service.”
The waiter might have remarked that he had been very attentive to the American officer’s needs in the past hour and a half. He might even have expressed surprise at the sudden deterioration of the new member’s French. However, stony-faced, he took Scharne’s order for two more Bamuiba beers.
The Frenchman at the next table had not missed a word, even turning slightly in his chair to have a direct look at Scharne. In English Scharne continued his harangue at me.
; “I sometimes wonder if we Americans are welcome at this club. I’ve been a member for two months and no one but other Americans talk to me.” Then shifting into French again, “Je parle français tout le temps, mais malgré de cela, les Françaises ne parlent jamais à moi. Peut-être ils n’aiment pas les Americains.”
“Peut-être,” I agreed.
Scharne had made his point. The Frenchman at the next table cleared his throat and said in fair English, “Pardon, monsieur. I could not help hearing what you say. May I be permitted to introduce myself to you and tell you personally that we are most happy to have you and the other Americans as members of our club?”
Scharne swiveled his body to face the smiling Frenchman. “Thank you, monsieur. You are the first member to offer to introduce himself to me. I am Major Fritz Scharne.”
“Henri Huyot,” the Frenchman replied. He made a courtly gesture toward the pretty, suntanned blonde. “May I have the honor to present Mademoiselle Denise Lefevre?”
Scharne stood up and bowed to the French girl. “Enchanté, Mademoiselle,” he said enthusiastically. After a long moment of unabashed admiration of the girl, whose tennis shorts and halter top showed her off to striking advantage, he introduced me.
“Enchanté,” I said, standing and bowing slightly.
“But please, Major,” Huyot said, “won’t you and your friend join us?”
“It is very kind of you, but I’m afraid we would be intruding.”
“Mais non, monsieur.” The girl looked up at Scharne, her eyes wide, smiling at his frank appraisal of her face and figure. “We will be most—how you say?—disappointed, if you do not join us.”