* * *
Waiting in a truck, with the heat just starting to build, it had been early, just after first light. Marder had been ordered to report to his commanding officer, a bottlecap colonel named Honus “Honey” Folger. Folger was out on the pistol range at Nakhon Phanom. One of his policies was that every person in his command be a proficient shot and that every person carry a sidearm when on duty, although the possibility of any of his airmen ever having to defend the base against enemy attack was remote—more than remote, absurd. Still, he was the CO of all the pinball wizards and they all had to qualify, including their leader. There he was in the approved stance, blasting away with his .45 while his aides stood in a worshipful little group behind the firing line.
After he was done and had cleared his weapon and stuck it back in the romantic leather shoulder holster he wore, an aide motioned peremptorily to Marder, who jumped out of his seat and moved smartly over to the line, where he saluted and reported as ordered.
Colonel Folger looked him up and down and indicated the holstered army .45 on Marder’s hip.
“Can you shoot that thing, son?”
“Yes, sir,” said Marder.
“Then do so.”
The pit crew set up a new man-shaped target at the ten-meter line, and Marder produced a single ragged hole in the silhouette’s head with his seven bullets.
Honey’s fleshy red face lit with a grin. “See? That’s what a little training can do,” he crowed to his assembled aides, and then in a lower voice said to Marder, “You didn’t learn to shoot like that in the goddamn air force, did you?”
“No, sir. I shot pistols as a boy. A lot.”
“Country boy, were you?”
“No, sir. I’m from Brooklyn.”
A surprised grunt from the colonel. He said, “Come on over here, I want to talk to you.”
They walked over to where a table and chairs had been set up under a distinctly un-military striped umbrella and sat down.
“Marder, I’ve had my eye on you for some time,” the colonel said. “You’re smart, and I think you’re tough. I have an instinct about these things. You’re not meant to spend the war staring at screens. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So tell me what you think, son. I mean about Igloo White and Alpha. The air force thinks it’s a great program, a war-changing program. Charlie needs three hundred tons of supplies every day to function in the south, and if we can strangle him on the trail, the VC will dry up and blow away. And we can, we can! I want to know every time a mouse farts along the whole length of the trail, and if that mouse is a commie mouse, I want to drop a bomb on him—not just near him, mind, but right on top of him. So tell me, son, why can’t I do that yet? Why in hell are those supplies still getting through?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I’m pretty low down on the intel food chain.”
“That’s why I’m asking you, Airman. I want the view from the trenches.”
“Well, sir,” replied Marder after a moment’s thought, “the first problem is the whole idea that it’s a trail. It’s not a trail; it’s a whole road network constantly being expanded and improved by an army of workers. I mean, you can just look at the maps, sir. Plus, the sensors are scattered by aircraft, sort of approximately where we know they have road networks. Some of them supposedly go into the ground like lawn darts, and others supposedly hang from camouflaged parachutes in the treetops. But we don’t know that. It’s a crapshoot. And the other thing is, the VC are no fools. They have to know about the sensors; they’ve probably taken them apart and know how they work. For all I know, they’ve found a lot of them and moved them to where they can’t do us any good. And also, well, the whole thing you said about strangling them. Basically we’ve got million-dollar computers and millions of dollars’ worth of aircraft, costing God knows how much to operate, just so we can drop a bomb and blow up a World War Two Russian truck and a thousand bucks’ worth of rice. I mean, won’t we run out of dollars before they run out of rice?”
The colonel frowned. “Don’t you think that’s a little above your pay grade, Airman Marder?”
“Yes, sir. Like I said before, but you asked me—”
“Yes, yes, but the other things you said are quite true. Very perceptive, Marder. I see I wasn’t wrong about you. Now let me ask you this: What’s the solution? How can we know the location of every vehicle on your vast road network? What would we need?”
“I don’t know, sir. The logistics and routing schedule of the Central Office for South Vietnam in your pocket, updated daily?”
Folger laughed. “Yeah, that would do it. But failing that—and, son, I’m going to tell you something that maybe ten people in this theater know about—we’ve got something just as good. We’ve got a new kind of sensor a little bigger than a regulation softball. It gets buried by the trail, and when trucks or personel pass by, it sends out data on speed and vector. I’m talking exact location now. What do you think of that, Marder?”
“It sounds pretty cool, sir. Who gets to bury these softballs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail?”
“Ah, SOG has been tasked with that by MACV—you know, the so-called Green Berets and their little jungle helpers. I’d argued that the air force has the capability to get in there and do the job and place its own sensors, but unfortunately I was overruled. Basically, it’s the army’s war, and they get to do it their way. However, we did prevail in one respect. MACV has authorized USAF liaison teams to work with the Special Forces, to calibrate the equipment when emplaced and do maintenance on the repeaters.”
“The repeaters, sir?”
“Yes, like network amplifiers. The little balls don’t have much range, and for technical reasons I won’t go into, their signals have to be picked up by a man-portable stationary unit and relayed up to the EC-121s. These repeaters will have to be buried at precise locations along the road network, and that task naturally will fall to us. To, uh, volunteer technicians who will infiltrate with the Special Forces and their montagnard allies and do the job. You understand what this means, right? For the first time we’ll have a true electronic fence, with defined sensor locations, across the whole trail complex. Nothing will move south that we don’t know about. It’ll be an order of magnitude increase in accuracy from what we’ve got now. We’ll bomb the living shit out of the bastards. And one other thing: such a technician would have to, uh, ascertain that the VEDUUs were properly deployed.”
“Voodoos, sir?”
“Vehicle detection uplink units. The softballs. We don’t want the little friends to just toss them anywhere, do we?”
“No, sir. So let me see if I’ve got this straight. These volunteer technicians are supposed to go unsupported into the most hostile area on earth in the company of the most dangerous men we’ve got, to deploy an untried technology, which, if it works, will focus the attention of the entire People’s Army of Vietnam on these volunteer technicians, and, in addition, these volunteer technicians are supposed to spy on the most dangerous men we’ve got, who are the only people protecting them from the PAVN. Do I have it right, sir?”
The colonel stared at him; Marder returned the stare. “Well, you’re certainly a direct bastard, Marder.”
“Yes, sir. I try to be. It saves time, and I figure if you want ass-kissing you’ve got all those guys over there to do it.” He gestured broadly to the waiting staffers.
“And dangerously close to insolent in the bargain.”
“Yes, sir, but I try to stay on the good side of that line. I figured you for an officer that can handle a little straight talk. You know and I know that you’re talking about something very close to a suicide mission. On the upside, obviously, any volunteers would get a full step up in grade and hazardous-duty pay.”
“Obviously. But I want you to know that should any of these volunteers get into trouble, the entire resources of the Seventh Air Force would be devoted to extracting them.”
“That’s good to know, sir. In that case, I would
be happy to volunteer for the mission. Does it have a name, by the way, sir?”
“Yes, we’re calling it Iron Tuna,” said Honey Folger. He stood; Marder stood. “You’ll report to squadron immediately for your new orders,” said Folger, now looking intently off at the horizon, as if he could with enough effort see the trail. “And, Marder? Not a fucking word about any of this to anyone.”
* * *
Marder reconstructed this dialogue in his head, found it interesting and satisfying that he could still do it. Whether it was literally true or not he couldn’t have said. He did recall the feel in his hand of the little devices, which they immediately rechristened “voodoos,” and of the grinding, Sisyphean weight of the man-portable repeaters on his back. His view of Honey Folger was conflated with other images: the man left the USAF in ’71, still a light colonel, went into defense contracting with Raytheon, made a bundle, ran for Congress in Arizona, won a seat, and then wrecked himself like so many others in the savings-and-loan scandal. Marder could recall the man’s face, fleshier than it had been, with the deer/headlights look they all had coming out of the courtroom after the indictment. He remembered that shot more clearly than he did the interview that had changed his life, that morning under the striped umbrella at the Naked Fanny pistol range.
* * *
There was one other vehicle in the lot, a large RV, the source of the faint music Marder had heard earlier. As the morning wore on, other cars and campers arrived. Marder was trying to think of the names of the other two volunteers in his volunteer group, one a tall pale boy from Tennessee and the other an Italian from Providence they called Sandhog. Sandhog and…?
While he was thus engaged, the rear door of the RV opened and Skelly emerged, and after him followed a middle-aged woman with teased blond hair and a tanned, ferrety face. She embraced Skelly warmly and her laugh rang across the parking lot, louder than the sound of the gulls. Then another woman stepped down, the same teased straw hair, the face less ferrety, pretty even, somewhat younger than the other. Marder figured them as sisters.
Skelly waved goodbye; the sisters blew kisses and waved back. In the driver’s seat of the truck, he inserted the key and said, “How about some breakfast, chief? I’m hungry as a mule.”
“So breakfast wasn’t part of the package over there?”
The truck roared to life and started rolling. “No, we were otherwise engaged,” said Skelly. “Those were the Cromer sisters of Amarillo, by the way. Sunny and Bunny. Touring this great land even as you and I are.”
“A little more mature than your usual taste, no?”
“Has nothing to do with taste, chief. That was what you all call an act of corporal mercy. I don’t believe those ladies have had a serious gentleman caller in some time. Good Christian women too. How often did they call upon the deity during our exertions! You know, I should’ve invited you in there. The gratitude of those girls would’ve melted your cold, cold heart. Whoa, there’s a Pancake House.”
“They must’ve been really hard up to settle for an old guy,” said Marder as they pulled in to the restaurant lot.
“You know, that kind of cruelty doesn’t suit you, Marder. As a matter of fact, they had all the necessary supplemental devices and chemicals, some of them that would probably shock your right-wing Catholic killjoy sensibilities, so I won’t mention them at this time.”
They got out of the truck, and Marder made sure to head for a seat with a good view of the parking lot. When they were seated, he remarked, “You know, speaking of Sunny and Bunny, I was just thinking about old Honey Folger. Do you remember him?”
Skelly wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, that douche bag. What made you think about him? You never think about the war.”
“I don’t know. Maybe hanging with you has unstopped the waters of memory. But it’s got all kinds of holes in it. For example, those two guys who trained with me. One of them was called Sandhog—”
“Sweathog Lascaglia. Edward G. The other one was Hayden, Ford T. They called him Patches, or Pinto, because of that white thing he had in his hair.”
“I didn’t have a nickname, did I? You were Skull, as I recall.”
“No, I don’t believe you did. We just called you Marder. You were too bland for a nickname, everything hidden away under your poncho, if memory serves, a cryptic person. As you still are.”
“Unlike yourself, as open as the southern skies.”
“Just so,” said Skelly, and to the waitress, through a blazing smile, “Yes, black coffee, miss, and a stack of pancakes as high as pretty you.”
3
Carmel Marder cruised through the water of the Zesiger Pool at MIT, her long arms consuming the meters, a niggling worry afflicting her thoughts. She understood that this constituted lack of focus, that real champions thought of nothing but the perfection of their movements while they worked out, but she was not that sort of champion. She was training for a meet in the eight-hundred-meter freestyle, her best event, which meant that every single day she had to come to this excellent Olympic-style pool and swim that distance at least ten times. Responsible to a fault, she rarely missed a day, but she also knew she lacked the killer instinct of the true champion; you simply could not think about anything else except (as a true champion had once said, and truly) eating, sleeping, and swimming.
She, in contrast, thought about many other things; she was thinking about them now as she completed lap fourteen, probably adding fractional seconds to her time, tiny bits of psychic drag on the wetted surface of her body. Her work also had to be stuffed in there somehow, between swimming and eating. She was part of a group designing the future of manufacturing, in the form of a 3-D printer-plus-robot that could actually make copies of itself. Theoretically, you could put one of these babies in an open field, supply it with power and raw materials, and after a time you could have a complex that could make anything makeable out of metal or plastic, at virtually any scale, since your original machines could also be programmed to make parts of larger copies of themselves. Of course, they’d had 3-D printers for years, but these were largely toys for producing prototypes or art objects. Her team was interested in making real things, starting with the machine itself. They called it the Escher Project, from the famous drawing by that artist of the hand that draws itself drawing a hand.
The work ran on its own track; a constant, it danced in her dreams, it invaded her infrequent romances. (What are you thinking about, he would say, smiling, and she would say, Nothing. But it was the work: everything.) Now, however, this extra non-work thought, this niggling worry: Where was Dad? And what was he doing?
Sixteen laps. She slid up onto the edge of the pool in one motion, like an otter mounting a rock, and checked the time of the final lap on her watch: 8:29.12. Better than virtually every female on planet earth, except the hundred or so women who competed at the international level, almost all of whom could swim the eight hundred meters in less than 8:20. Sighing, she let herself hurt, let the muscles dump their lactic acid, allowed her breathing to recover its normal tempo.
Then she rose, snapped a tiny crescent of buttock back where it belonged, and pulled her cap and goggles off, revealing pale-green eyes and dark-red wavy hair, parted in the middle and cut into short wings. As she picked up her towel and logbook and headed for the locker room, those who knew high-end swimming could observe that she possessed the ideal female swimmer’s body—the small head, the broad shoulders, the exiguous breasts and hips, hands like shovels, feet like flippers. There was also that face.
“Yo, Statch,” said a young man, another pool rat, as he walked by on the corridor leading to the lockers. She waved back, not pausing to chat. When strangers asked her the origin of the odd nickname, she would shrug off the question—a family thing, she would say, and partially true, since her older brother had been the first to bestow it. Later, if she liked the person, and in private, she would strike the pose: foam-rubber spiky green crown on her head, right arm upraised and holding a flashlight, large volume
under the left arm, and her remarkable features set in a stern expression.
“Holy shit” would be the usual response, or startled laughter, for Carmel Beatriz Maria Marder y d’Ariés, her brow broad, her nose bold, wide-bridged, and straight as a die, her eyes deep set and heavy lidded, her mouth a set of generous petals, looked (except that her complexion was rosy gold and not verdigris) exactly like the Statue of Liberty. Her appearance both fascinated and terrified the typical male denizens of MIT engineering labs, which was fine with her: she tended to treat her male colleagues asexually, as if they were somewhat rude but endearing little brothers. Nor was she interested in professors or the occasional touring genius. She had no trouble getting dates when she so desired but selected the lucky men from nerd-free venues far beyond the university districts of Cambridge.
She changed from her tank suit into jeans, Converse high-tops, and a khaki safari shirt with lots of pockets, all of which bulged with various bits of gear she felt naked without: knife, tools, Rotring pen, notebooks, cell phone, electronic scraps. She walked across Mass Avenue to Building 3, where she shared a tiny office with a Chinese-Vietnamese grad student named Karen Liu and where the Escher Project was located. Liu was there, as she almost always was, earbuds socketed, staring at a CAD/CAM screen’s representation of an effector arm. Statch sat at her own machine and continued with what she had been working on before she broke for swimming, which was the design of a three-fingered hand that was supposed to take a part out of the sinter bath, expose it to an air blast that would blow the steel dust off it, move it into the oven, take it out when it was finished, and send it down to the assembler. As with all parts of Escher, the problem was constrained by the requirement that everything in the machine would also have to be made by the machine, using the same 3-D manufacturing process. It had to be simple and it had to work. Either of these goals was easy to achieve; doing them both at the same time was Engineering. A Schue Saying, as it was called in the lab.
The Return: A Novel Page 5