by Mark Gimenez
Seven Days in May starring Major Charles Woodrow Walker.
FBI Special Agent Jan Jorgenson was viewing an old grainy videotape of the court-martialed war criminal Major Charles Woodrow Walker. He was handsome, a charismatic speaker, and the leader of a plot to overthrow the United States government. He commanded a personal army of former soldiers. He was operating under the radar, back before 9/11, back when the Bureau’s domestic radar screen was filled not with Islamic extremists but with homegrown hate groups—Aryan Nation, National Alliance, the Order, the Klan, skinheads, the right-wing militia movement: a bunch of dumb-ass white boys who so hated blacks and Jews that they had retired to the mountains of Idaho and Montana to live without electricity or running water or blacks or Jews. But while the Bureau concerned itself with weekend warriors who couldn’t overthrow their own town councils if their lives depended on it, completely undetected were Walker and his soldiers, real warriors trained by the U.S. government to overthrow other countries’ governments. Walker was a clear and present danger to America: a pissed-off Green Beret can be a nation’s worst nightmare.
And the Bureau might never have learned of Walker’s plot until the military coup began if this videotape had not been sent to the FBI twelve years ago with an anonymous handwritten note that read: Patty Walker said if I don’t see her for three months, the major done killed her, and I better mail this. So I am. The package was postmarked Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The Bureau put a team in Bonners Ferry. They alerted local law enforcement and hospitals. They searched for Walker’s secret mountain compound but without success. So they waited to get lucky.
Two years later, they did.
Walker strode into the hospital in Bonners Ferry with his dying son in his arms. The hospital treated the boy and called the Feds; the FBI arrested Walker without incident and airlifted him to the maximum-security prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, to await trial for treason.
A trial that never took place.
Walker’s men took a high-ranking government employee hostage and threatened to send the hostage back in pieces unless Walker was released. FBI Director Laurence McCoy refused—until he received the first installment. McCoy released Walker, who then disappeared into Mexico. And there his life ended. Three weeks later, Major Charles Woodrow Walker died of a heart attack.
Washington had overnighted the entire file on Major Walker—the videotape, photographs, and background reports of Walker and his followers. Their military careers were classified just like Colonel Brice’s. There was no mention of Viper team or a Viper tattoo. The last item in the file was a copy of his New York Times obituary. Jan sat back. Her revenge theory didn’t wash.
Major Charles Woodrow Walker had been dead for ten years.
4:05 P.M.
Bonners Ferry, Idaho, population 2,600, sits along the south bank of the Kootenai River twenty-four miles from the Canadian border, 1,800 feet above sea level, and nestled among three mountain ranges with peaks reaching 8,000 feet into the big sky. The original inhabitants of the “Nile of the North,” as this fertile river valley became known, were members of the Kootenai Nation, whose local residency dated back to prehistoric times. The white man came to this part of Idaho on his way to Canada during the gold rush of 1863; he stayed to harvest the tall timber that covered 90 percent of the land. A century and a half later, the Kootenai tribe owns the town’s only casino, the descendants of the gold rushers grow Christmas trees, and northern Idaho has become a haven for racists, neo-Nazis, and right-wing antigovernment zealots.
Only the latter fact did Ben know when he parked the Land Rover in front of the Boundary County Courthouse. He and John stepped through the icy slush and walked into the three-story white stone structure. They located the sheriff’s office; inside, a plump middle-aged woman sat at a desk behind a waist-high wood partition. Behind her desk was a door marked SHERIFF J. D. JOHNSON. On the wall next to the door were framed photographs in each of which appeared a tall rugged man with progressively less and grayer hair—and one photograph when the man had a full head of black hair, in a place Ben knew all too well.
“Here to pay a fine?” the woman asked.
“No, ma’am,” Ben said, “we’re—”
“File a complaint?”
“No, ma’am—”
“Service of process?”
John planted his hands on the partition and leaned over. “Cripes, lady, we’re looking for the freaking Nazis that kidnapped my daughter!”
The woman stared at him over her glasses. “O-kay.”
The door behind her opened, and the man in the photographs appeared, wearing a uniform like he had worn one all his life.
“Louann,” the man said, “I’m occupado tonight. Tell Cody he’s in charge.”
He noticed Ben and John; he glanced back at the woman.
“Sheriff, these gentlemen are here about some Nazis,” she said as if it were a routine request.
The sheriff gave Ben and John a law enforcement once-over—they probably appeared ragged, almost twenty-four hours on the road—then came around the partition. He walked with a slight limp. Ben stuck out his hand.
“Sheriff, Ben Brice. And my son, John.”
The sheriff’s hair was combed neatly and he smelled of cologne, as if he had just freshened up in his office. He shook their hands.
“J. D. Johnson. What’s this about some Nazis?”
Ben held out Gracie’s photo. “My granddaughter’s been kidnapped.”
The sheriff studied the photo. “The girl down in Texas.” Then he answered Ben’s unasked question. “NLETS, law enforcement Teletype.”
“We think she’s up here,” Ben said.
“Thought the abductor hung himself?”
“He was the wrong man.”
“FBI seems to think he was the right man.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Unh-hunh.”
The sheriff scratched his square jaw; his fingernails sounded like number-six sandpaper on his day-old beard.
“And you figure some Nazi-type brought her up here?”
“We were told a lot of them live in this area.”
The sheriff sighed. “That is a fact.”
“She was in Idaho Falls on Sunday evening, positive ID, with two men wearing camouflage fatigues, heading north five hundred miles in a white SUV with Idaho plates.”
“Well, that’d put them right about here, wouldn’t it?”
“Look, Sheriff, if you could give us a few minutes of your time, look at a few photos …”
The sheriff shrugged. “All right, Mr. Brice. First thing in the morning.”
“Could we do it now, Sheriff? It’s an emergency.”
“It’s also my anniversary. Taking the wife to dinner, and I gotta pick up this little bracelet I got for her …” He turned for the door. “Oh-six-hundred, Mr. Brice.”
He had his hand on the doorknob when Ben said, “You were a slick driver at Da Krong?”
The sheriff stopped dead in his tracks. His leathery face rotated around; he had a quizzical expression.
“On the wall,” Ben said.
The sheriff walked over and lifted a framed photo off its wall hook. “Me and my warrant officer. He came home in a body bag.” He paused, his eyes still on the photo; his rough fingers gently brushed dust from the glass. He cleared his throat and turned to Ben. “J. D. Johnson, captain, Marine Corps.”
“Ben Brice, colonel, Army Green Berets.”
12 Feb 71. Captain J. D. Johnson is piloting the UH-1D chopper transporting seven Marines to a battle zone near the Laos border in the Da Krong Valley. He’s flying lead slick in a V formation with four other birds. His .45-caliber sidearm hangs between his legs to protect his privates from ground fire. He’s running sixty knots at twelve hundred feet. He has done this hundreds of times and come home every time.
He spots the green smoke marking the landing zone. He brings the Huey down in a steep descent and hears the accompanying gunships firing rockets into the surroun
ding trees; they’re prepping the landing zone, running a racetrack loop over the LZ so that cover fire is continuous during troop deployment.
Another hot LZ.
He sees tracer rounds coming at his ship. His door gunner opens fire with the M-60. Thirty seconds to drop the troops and get the hell out. He comes in fast, flares the nose to slow his air speed, and hovers three feet off the ground as the troops un-ass the bird from both sides; there are no doors on these slicks. The all clear and he dips the nose to gain speed to pull out. Just as he clears the trees, the chopper explodes. When he wakes, he hears voices speaking Vietnamese.
Captain J. D. Johnson is a POW.
Night has descended over South Vietnam and he’s wondering if his warrant officer made it out alive. He’s bound and sitting in the corner of an earthen bunker carved out of the hillside; he took a bullet in his left leg. From his limited knowledge of Vietnamese, he gathers that a platoon will take the captured American to an NVA base camp in Laos tomorrow.
By the next night, he is in Laos; it’s the first night of a three-day march to the NVA base camp. He’s sitting up against a tree; his hands are bound behind him. His leg is broken and the wound is infected. He’s sweating profusely from the fever and his mind is getting clouded. Except for the guard sitting a few feet away, his captors are sleeping in gray hooches and hammocks strung between the trees, completely unconcerned that their American prisoner might attempt an escape.
J. D. Johnson, from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, never figured on dying in some damn jungle in Laos.
The guard suddenly slumps over without a sound; blood streams from his throat. J.D.’s hands fall; his bindings are cut. A face appears before him—Jesus! A goddamned Indian! He is lifted like he weighs fifty pounds instead of one-ninety and slung over a bare shoulder. They walk silently between two NVA soldiers snoring in hammocks.
All night they walk, his head bobbing at a smooth rhythm, his eyes seeing only the trail beneath the Indian’s bare feet as they travel through the jungle; his mind comes in and out of consciousness, wrapped in a blanket of fever.
When he wakes, dawn is breaking. As is the sky. A patch of blue up above. And an American voice beside him, calling for a Medevac: “I say again, Johnson, J. D., Marine …”
His vision is blurred; he shakes his head, but the fever grips him like a vice. Who are these people? He tries to focus on the American. He’s a soldier. He passes out again.
He comes to, the THUMP THUMP THUMP of a chopper coming out of the hole in the clouds, a red cross on a white square on the chopper’s nose: a U.S. Army Medevac. Tears come into his eyes. J. D. Johnson was not going to die in some damn jungle in Laos, at least not today.
He is lifted from the ground and the sound of the chopper grows louder. His face is not against the bare brown chest of the Indian but against the American’s fatigues. He sees the blades rotating above him and he hears more American voices—
“Goddamn, you’re the one they talk about! Green Beret colonel living in the jungle with the Indians! You’re a fucking legend!”
—and he’s being lifted into the chopper. He grabs the American’s fatigues, and with all the strength left in his body, he pulls his face next to the soldier’s chest, to his nametag, and he makes out a name he will never forget: BRICE.
4:33 P.M.
“If you’re white and pissed off at the world, chances are you call Idaho home.”
The sheriff was leaning back in a squeaky swivel chair behind his metal desk; he had changed his mind and decided to talk with them now. Ben and John sat in metal chairs on the visitors’ side of the desk.
“State’s become a damn mecca for those people—white supremacists, skinheads, militias, neo-Nazis—every goddamn kook in the country’s moving to Idaho, living on a mountain and hating everyone don’t look like them.” He shook his head. “People used to come here to fish.”
He handed the photos back to Ben.
“We got a bunch of them living around here, Colonel, but I’ve never seen no one looks like these two. The ones left stay up in the mountains for the most part. They don’t bother us, we don’t bother them.”
Ben gestured at the Boundary County map on the wall behind the sheriff.
“Any idea where their camps are?”
The sheriff stood and stepped to the map.
“Thirteen, fourteen years ago, before they had real terrorists to deal with, FBI was waging war on these guys. They set up a command post here, flew surveillance over the mountains looking for their camps. Thirteen hundred square miles in Boundary Country, lots of room to hide. The Feds identified four camps east of town, seven west, all off unpaved roads. This time of year, you need a four-wheel-drive to get up the muddy roads ’cause of the snow melt. And even if you get up there, you won’t see much from the road. The camps are up in the mountains, blocked out by the trees. If your girl’s in one of those camps, finding her ain’t gonna be easy. And getting her down damn near impossible.”
The sheriff put a finger on the map.
“FBI tried to bring one of those guys off Ruby Ridge in ninety-two, got a marshal killed. Brought in the Hostage Rescue Team even though there weren’t no hostages, put eleven snipers on that mountain, told them to shoot on sight. They did. Killed the guy’s wife. Shot her in the head while she was holding her baby. Government ended up paying him three million bucks.”
“Any place they hang out when they come to town?”
“Place just south of town, Rusty’s Tavern and Grill, but don’t eat the food. Beer joint. Some gals. Rough place, but we leave ’em alone long as they don’t shoot each other.”
Ben stood. “Sheriff, I appreciate your time. My apologies to your wife.”
“Thirty-four years, she’s used to me being late.”
The two middle-aged men, soldiers of a forgotten war, shook hands; they considered embracing but resisted. Ben and John were at the door when the sheriff spoke again.
“Colonel, if you don’t mind me asking, what would a couple Nazi-wannabes living in Idaho want with your granddaughter?”
Ben paused a moment, then he said, “To settle an old score.”
The sheriff studied Ben; he nodded. “One more thing, Colonel. Most of those fellas are just dumb-ass white boys couldn’t spell cat if you spotted them c and t, lucky just to find their way home at night. But there’s a few who ain’t just playing soldier. You go looking for your girl, you be ready.”
“I am.”
A slight smile from the sheriff. “I expect you are. And Colonel … thanks. For back then.”
Ben nodded. And a thought occurred to him. “Sheriff, there wouldn’t be a chopper for hire around here, would there?”
“Matter a fact, boy down by Naples got one. Dicky, we use him for search-and-rescues when a tourist gets lost hiking in the woods. I’ll give him a call.” He turned to his phone but stopped. “Tell you what. Meet me here at oh-six-hundred, we’ll drive down there together. Little air recon might do me good.”
“Oh-six-hundred,” Ben said. “We’ll be here.”
“Check your time, Colonel. We’re on Pacific time up here.”
The sheriff stood, walked over, and opened the door.
“You know, Colonel, one good thing about you hunting your girl without the Feds.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t gotta worry about them getting her killed.”
4:52 P.M.
“You just missed him,” the store owner said, “not half an hour. Boy didn’t know a tampon from a Tootsie Roll.”
He laughed at his own words. The General Store on Main Street had been in his family for over fifty years. It was a place where you could buy food, fertilizer, clothes, and tampons.
“Like a boy asking for rubbers. Hands me a little piece of paper with the name on it”—the owner leaned down under the counter; Ben could hear him rustling in a trash can—“yep, here it is.”
He bumped his head on the underside of the counter, then he reappeared, rub
bing his bare scalp with one hand and holding out a scrap of white paper with the other. Two words had been written on the paper—Tampax tampons—and under the words a happy face had been drawn.
“That’s her handwriting,” Ben said.
“And her happy face,” John said.
The owner ducked his head slightly and said, “Am I bleeding?”
Ben shook his head. “Can you describe him?”
“Blond hair, blue eyes, about your height but stockier, maybe twenty-five. I see him a half-dozen times a year. Strange bird.”
“How so?”
“What he buys—girls’ clothes, pink pajamas, Barbie doll …”
“Gracie doesn’t do dolls,” Ben said.
John gritted his teeth: “Bagbiter.”
“No, he didn’t want a bag. Stuck the box under his coat like it was a girlie magazine and left … say, that reminds me. Few months back, he bought a Fortune magazine. I remember ’cause he didn’t look like an investor. May still have the one.” He bent over again and rummaged around below the counter. “Yeah, here it is.” He came back up with the Fortune magazine. He looked at the cover picture of John and then at John. “Say, that looks just like you.” He glanced back at the cover. “That is you.” He opened the magazine to the story with the Brice family portrait. “I was standing right here reading your story when he just snatched it out of my hands.”
“Notice which way he drove out of town?”
“North. He was parked right there where you are. Pulled out and headed north, sure did.”
Ben thanked the owner for his time, and he and John turned to leave.
“Oh, one more thing,” the owner said. They turned back. “He’s missing a finger. This one.”