by Mark Gimenez
“Roger Dalton was the brother I never had,” Ben said. “We went through West Point together, then to Vietnam together.” He paused. “Academy instructors, they told us it would be our great adventure. It wasn’t.”
John’s eyes remained on the photo of his mother and father; his mother was holding him and his father looked so strong and manly. There was manly somewhere in John Brice’s genes.
“You were born a week before we deployed. On our flight to Saigon, Roger said, ‘Anything happens to me, you be my son’s father.’ He was killed two weeks later.”
“How’d he die?”
“A soldier’s death.”
Ben’s voice cracked. John wanted to know more, but he decided that now wasn’t the time.
“What happened to my mother?”
“Mary, she was smart just like you. But when Roger died, it’s like her mind couldn’t handle it. She was just too fragile to fit in this world.”
“Like me.”
“She died when you were six months old. We adopted you.”
“John Roger Brice.” Ben nodded. “Where are they buried?”
“Iowa. Where they were from.”
“When this is over, I think I’ll go to Iowa. Is his name on the Wall in Washington?”
“I suppose. I’ve never been able to go.”
“Maybe I’ll go to Iowa and then to the Wall. Maybe you’ll come with me.”
“Maybe.”
John looked at the photo again. “I always thought Gracie got her eyes and hair from you.”
Would she look for her daughter in every blonde blue-eyed girl she saw on the street, in the mall, and at restaurants? Would she wonder what her daughter looked like with each passing year, like those age-progression images she had seen of children missing for five or ten or fifteen years on the missingkids.com website? Would she always hold out hope that her daughter was still alive, somewhere? Would she become one of those pitiful mothers of lost children she had seen on TV, keeping Grace’s room exactly as it was now, always believing that one day she would return to this room?
The doorbell rang.
Elizabeth was still in her bathrobe and in her daughter’s room, so many thoughts running through her mind, trying to imagine life without Grace.
The doorbell rang again.
Her heart froze. Then it began to beat rapidly; her breathing came faster. She stood. She knew.
It’s her! It’s Grace! She’s come home!
Elizabeth bolted out of the bedroom and ran down the long hall and to the stairs and down to the first floor and through the foyer and to the front door and pulled the door open, ready to embrace her daughter and to hold her and to cry with her and to never let her go.
But you’re not Grace.
Standing on the porch was a young woman in a black dress; her anguished face seemed vaguely familiar. It took Elizabeth a moment to place it. Gary Jennings’s wife.
Elizabeth slumped against the doorjamb. She had been so sure it was Grace. Now, for the first time since the abduction, she thought she might be drifting toward insanity, floating on a raft down a slow-moving river, steadily and inexorably toward rapids where she would crack up on the rocks, finally to be thrown over the edge of a steep fall, driven down deep into the darkness below, never to resurface. The thought was inviting.
“Mrs. Brice, I’m so sorry about Gracie. But my husband didn’t take her. Gary would never do something like that.”
She started to leave, but she stopped when Elizabeth said, “Your baby.”
She turned back and said, “The doctors say she’ll be okay.”
She walked down to a waiting car, got in, and drove off. The street was silent and vacant; a few pink ribbons tied to mailboxes fluttered in the breeze and several scattered missing-child fliers skipped along the ground like children playing hopscotch. The TV trucks and police cars and cameras and reporters and gawkers were gone, back to their lives as if the world had not been irrevocably altered seven days ago; fathers and career mothers had gone back to their offices, stay-at-home moms to exercise classes and shopping malls, children to school, reporters to new stories, and the networks to New York. The circus had moved on.
Elizabeth turned and shut the door on her life.
2:38 P.M.
John watched as Ben opened a door to a vault under the floor of the workshop and then knelt down and shone a flashlight into the dark space below.
“I hate rats,” he said.
Satisfied, he hopped down into the hole. His head was below floor level. He handed up three long metal containers. Then he hoisted himself out.
Ben dusted off one container with a cloth. He unlatched the locks and lifted the top. Inside, set into a molded form, were a black rifle, boxes of ammunition, two telescopes, one normal size, the other oversized, a black tube, what John knew was a silencer, a leather shoulder sling, two ammunition magazines, and a crude brass bracelet.
Ben slipped the bracelet onto his left wrist, then he removed the rifle and mounted the smaller scope and the silencer. He loaded a magazine and snapped it into the underside of the rifle and attached the sling at both ends. He stood and walked outside. John followed.
Facing the vast open space, Ben knelt, raised the rifle to his shoulder, gripped the underside of the stock with his left hand, extended his right elbow from his body, and sighted in with his right eye. The sound of the rifle’s discharge was muffled. Ben grunted, adjusted the scope, sighted, and fired again. Another adjustment and another shot.
“What are you shooting at?”
“Cholla cactus, five hundred meters out.”
John slanted his glasses to obtain sharper vision but without success. “Dang, I can’t even see it.”
“Inside, in one of the other boxes—a spotting scope.”
John returned to the workshop and opened the other containers. Inside one were a knife with Viper etched into the shiny blade, two sets of dog tags, one for Brice, Ben, and the other for Dalton, Roger, a small machine gun with a shoulder strap, and the spotting telescope. John took his father’s dog tags and put them around his neck. He then removed the scope and ran back out.
Ben said, “Straight down the barrel, rock formation.”
John looked into the scope, adjusted the focus, and spotted the rock formation.
“Got it.”
“Beyond that, a cactus.”
“With the yellow flower?”
“Yep.”
Standing behind Ben, John figured the theoretical probability of hitting that flower from five hundred meters—1,640 feet—had to be one in a million, even in the perfectly still conditions, and particularly by a sixty-year-old … the thought crept into John’s mind … drunk. The rifle discharged; the yellow flower split off whole from the cactus.
“Dang, Ben, that’s awesome! You must’ve been a dead shot!”
From Ben’s expression, John knew he had said exactly the wrong thing. Ben stood and walked over to a big rock and sat; he stared at the dirt for a time. Finally he spoke.
“NVA officers didn’t wear insignia. You couldn’t tell a grunt from a general, so you’d sit outside their camp, maybe a thousand meters out, watching them through the binoculars until you picked out the ranking officer, sometimes just because he had more cigarettes in his pocket. Then you’d wait until he was sitting down, eating, and you’d put the scope on him. And when you did, you played God. You decided he’d never see his wife or kids again, or even the next day, that because he was born in Hanoi instead of Houston he deserved a bullet in his head. You observed the last moments of his life, the last smile on his face, the last drag on his cigarette, and you squeezed the trigger. And his life was over.”
He looked up at John.
“I didn’t kill for God or country, or for those medals, or even to defeat Communism. Well, at first I did, but at the end, when I knew the war was lost, I killed so fewer American boys would come home in a body bag. Like your father did. That’s why I stayed over there, John. That’
s why I wasn’t here for you.”
John looked out on New Mexico and felt his eyes water. “I should’ve been there for Gracie. I should’ve hung up on Lou and gone to the concession stand with her. I should have protected her.” He shook his head slowly. “Ben, I just let her go.”
“No, son, you didn’t let her go. They took her.” Ben stood and was the colonel in the photos again. “And we’re fixing to take her back.”
After graduating from high school, boys in Henryetta, Oklahoma, either go to college on football scholarships, take up farming like their fathers before them, or join the Army. Jack Odell Smith was big and strong and played football for Henryetta High, but he got ejected from most games for unsportsmanlike conduct. And he never took to the plow. So, barely a month after graduating at the bottom of his class, Jack O. Smith had joined the United States Army.
Jacko was not your leader of men. But he was a loyal follower and kept his mouth shut, character traits much admired in this man’s Army. Those traits, along with his physical strength, temper, and ability to kill without remorse, earned him a spot in the Special Forces Training Group at Fort Bragg. There he had met Major Charles Woodrow Walker.
Jack Odell Smith had found his place in life.
Major Charles Woodrow Walker had always thought his place in life would be the White House. “Jacko,” the major had said, “the American people are sheep. In times of peace, they just want to graze off the land and feel fat and happy. But when the wolves are in the pasture, they want to feel safe. ‘Make love not war’ sounds good when the war is ten thousand miles away. But when war comes home to America, and it will, the American people will turn to a military hero to make them feel safe. They will turn to me.”
But then the verdict was read: guilty. War criminals don’t get to be president.
Jack Odell Smith would not call himself a thinking man. He had always left his thinking to the major. But now, driving back to their mountain compound with Ben Brice’s granddaughter in the back seat, he found himself thinking about how one event could change the course of history: What if Lieutenant Ben Brice had honored the soldiers’ code?
Viper team would have continued covert operations in Laos and Cambodia and North Vietnam. The war would have been won by professional warriors. Soldiers would have come home to a hero’s welcome. No one would know about Quang Tri because no one walked away from Quang Tri. And Major Charles Woodrow Walker would be in the White House because on 9/11 the war had come home to America.
Now Lieutenant Ben Brice was coming home to Viper team.
Gracie had seen Ben’s tattoo many times, and he had even let her touch it, but he would never tell her why he got it or what the strange words meant. He only told her they were Vietnamese. Looking now at the same words on Jacko’s tattoo, she saw her chance.
“What do those Vietnamese words mean, on your tattoo?”
Jacko blew out smoke and said, “ ‘We kill for peace.’ ”
Gracie had often asked Ben about his war—she wanted to know why he was a drunk—but he refused to talk about it. “Honey,” he’d always say, “you’ll learn about the bad things in life soon enough. No need for me to hurry that day up.”
She sighed. That day had come.
“Did Ben kill people in his war?”
“Damn sure did. He was a sniper.” Jacko sucked on his cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said, “Your grandpa was a traitor, but I’ll say this for him: he was one helluva shot. He could put a bullet between a gook’s eyes from a thousand meters.”
Gracie fell quiet. Because now she knew something she wished she didn’t know, like when she’d read ahead in a book and find out the ending. She knew what Ben would have to do, and it made her sad to know it. She had figured out that he drank his whiskey to forget his war; now she knew he drank to forget killing people in his war. She didn’t want him to drink more of his whiskey because of her.
Jacko said, “Yep, damn shame he betrayed his team and now I gotta kill him.”
Gracie’s voice sounded odd, even to her own ears, when she said, “No, you’re not going to kill Ben. He’s going to kill you. And Junior, too.”
The two men didn’t say anything for a long while.
4:42 P.M.
“I was still in ROTC at A&M when the Quang Tri shit hit the fan.”
FBI Special Agent Jan Jorgenson had just reported to her superior her latest findings on the Gracie Ann Brice abduction. Agent Devereaux was still in Des Moines. The boy abducted there had been found dead. A manhunt was on for his abductor, a convicted child molester out on parole. For the third time.
“I’m running searches on Major Walker,” Jan said.
“Why?”
“Because Colonel Brice served under Walker in Viper unit. Because he has a Viper tattoo and the man in the park had a Viper tattoo. Because those soldiers committed a massacre, Brice testified against them, and Walker said he should’ve killed Brice. Because you said you wouldn’t have closed the case.”
“I know, Jan, but you think Walker’s been waiting almost forty years to get revenge on Colonel Brice? And somehow finds his granddaughter living in a gated community in Post Oak, Texas, kidnaps her, frames Jennings, and takes her to God knows where?”
Now that she actually heard her theory aloud, it did sound pretty ridiculous.
“And even if Walker wanted revenge on Colonel Brice, how would he connect him to Gracie and how would he find her? And if he wanted revenge, wouldn’t he just kill Colonel Brice? Why would he abduct his granddaughter?”
“He wouldn’t. I guess you’re right, Eugene, but this Viper connection, that’s an awfully big coincidence.”
10:33 P.M.
John hadn’t invited Ben to his MIT graduation because of that damned Viper tattoo. He was worried that someone important to his future business career might see it and learn his father had been in the Army and had fought in Vietnam: the prevailing thought back then among professors at elite Northeastern schools was that only Southern crackers, minorities, and losers had gone to Vietnam. He had feared that because his father was a loser, someone might think John Brice was a loser, too. He had never talked about Ben to anyone, not even Elizabeth. He had never told her about that damned tattoo. But she knew Ben Brice was a loser; and that her husband was a loser, too.
Now, looking over at Ben sleeping in the passenger seat as John R. Brice, billionaire, drove a new $53,000 Land Rover loaded with weapons like the freaking U.S. cavalry through the Navajo Indian Reservation in northwest New Mexico, red cliffs looming large in the moonlight, John realized that those professors had been full of shit. As he had been. As his wife was.
Ben Brice was no loser.
Thirteen hundred miles due north, Junior stopped the Blazer in front of a cabin on a mountain in Idaho called Red Ridge. He would give anything for the major to walk out that door and see Patty. She was sleeping in the back seat.
“I got her,” Junior said.
Jacko grunted and disappeared into the dark, heading to his cabin. Junior opened the rear door and leaned inside. He slid his arms under Patty and lifted her. He stepped out of the vehicle.
“I’ll walk,” Patty said in a groggy voice, rubbing her eyes.
Junior gently leaned over until her feet touched the ground. He held onto her lightly to make sure she was stable.
“You awake enough?”
“I think so,” she said. Then she punched him in the nose and took off running into the darkness. Damn, she was fast for a girl. And hit hard, too.
Junior didn’t give chase because she was running straight for Jacko’s cabin. Sure enough, Junior shortly heard a scream. After a moment, Patty appeared again, carried by Jacko like a bag of fertilizer. He dropped her at Junior’s feet.
Junior sighed. “Patty, you’d’ve froze to death before morning. Now, if you run again, I’m gonna have to teach you a lesson you ain’t gonna like. I don’t want to do that, but I will for your own good. This is your home now, Patty, you got to accept that. We
’re always gonna be together.”
Patty looked up at Junior.
“In your dreams, mountain boy,” she said.
Kate stirred in bed. She felt someone rustling around beside her. Sam.
“Nanna, I got the creeps again.”
“Another bad dream?”
“Unh-hunh. About Gracie.”
“You got Barney?”
“Yep.”
He wedged the stuffed Barney doll in between them and snuggled in tightly. After a moment, she thought he had fallen asleep, but his little voice broke the silence.
“Nanna, some man’s not gonna take me away too, is he?”
She propped herself up on her elbow and touched his smooth face. “No, Sam. That won’t happen. I promise.”
“Good.”
He closed his little eyes.
DAY EIGHT
7:10 A.M.
Gracie opened her eyes.
She was lying in a warm bed with a blanket pulled up to her chin, and not the scratchy green blanket from the SUV, but a thick soft blanket that felt brand new. The sheets were flannel and smelled clean and fresh. The pillow under her head was firm. The ceiling above her was low, and there was no fan with fancy little lights or sky blue paint with clouds in white faux finish or fancy crown molding like in her bedroom at home. The walls and ceiling were wood, flat wood planks with white mortar in the cracks like between the logs in Ben’s cabin.
The bed was pushed against one wall of the small room. A little window was in the wall above the bed; the sun was shooting a beam of light into the room. A gas heater was glowing blue in the corner. There was no closet, only a hanging rack with some winter clothes. At the foot of the bed was a metal table with a kerosene lamp on it, like the one Dad had bought last summer for the first annual Brice family camping trip. But Mom had gotten a trial and Dad the IPO, so the lamp and the tent and the rest of the camping gear sat piled in the back corner of the garage. Propped up on the table was a new Barbie doll still in the box.
This was really starting to creep her out.
There were two doors; one led into a bathroom. She could see a toilet, but it wasn’t like the marble toilet with matching bidet in her bathroom at home. This one sat low to the ground and had a compartment underneath—a camping toilet.